| Author |
Message |
    
Matthew Donaldson
New member
Username: Mcgd
Post Number: 1
Registered: 3-2008
| | Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 - 7:08 am: |   |
Hi,
I have a hand-held panorama of 8 photos, and all stitch together fine with the fully automatic mode except for the first and last pairs. What I would like to be able to do is run it with fully automatic, and then go back and manually stitch the two end pairs. By manually stitch, I mean setting up a number of control points on the two images.
Is there some way to do this? I know I can go back and open the overlap zone, but this doesn't work in this case as I need to be able to rotate as well as move the images.
I saw a reference in the manual to the ability to start the wizard on a selection of images, and I used this to successfully stitch the first pair together, but this gave me a separate stitched image, not related to the main one.
Is there some way I can go with mainly automatic with part manual? It takes a long time to manually stitch all of them together.
Thanks
-Matthew |
David Richardson
New member
Username: Customdavid
Post Number: 31
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 - 1:57 pm: | |
Matthew -
I am impressed that you did this handheld and got 6 of the 8 to work in the full auto mode! While it may be possible (John will know) to tack on the other photo's, the problem that I have always had is that PF wants the images to be of the same size. Your images will be of two regular sized pictures plus one really wide one for the middle. PF will have a problem with this.
What I would suggest is using the partial automation setting. If you go fully manual you will need a minimum of 5 points for each image pair, and yes that can be time consuming (although 8 is not too bad, I have done it with 15-16 images and it took forever).
If you do semi automatic, you will need to match 5 points for the first pair of images, but after that you only need to match one point. What I would suggest is match 5 points to images 1 & 2 then one point to images 2-7 and then 5 points again for images 7 & 8.
The one problem is that this means that your images need to be pretty close on level and rotation. If they are not, could be a problem, but if you got 6 of them to work in full automatic, maybe OK. When you are done, save your settings as a PF project so that if it does not come out that you can go back and try it again in the full manual mode.
Good luck,
David |
John Strait
Moderator
Username: Jstrait
Post Number: 348
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 - 3:24 pm: | |
David's advice is good. If you omit stitching points from a pair of images, The Panorama Factory does the best it can. You might not even need single match points on the middle images as David suggested. It will try to do auto stitching on pairs that have no points.
It's also possible to use Manual stitching without putting point pairs on all images. The Panorama Factory will let you continue if it is able to solve at least one pair of images using your stitching points.
When you click "Next", it will evaluate the stitching points. If it's able to solve at least one pair of images, it will prompt you with a message box asking whether you want to advance with incomplete stitching points. Try clicking "Yes". The Panorama Factory will assume that images without points have the same tilt/rotate settings as the preceding ones.
You could try putting point pairs on the first two and the last two images and then try either Manual or Semi-automatic stitching to see which one gives better results. You can back up in the Wizard and change the stitching method without losing your stitching points, so you can do a little experimenting to see what works.
One small piece of advice. People often assume that adding more stitching points helps when PF is unable to find a solution. However, sometimes adding more points makes it more difficult to find a solution. In my experience, 5 points is enough if you find the right points!
Anyway, for a particular set of images this might or might not work. The only way to find out for sure is to try it.
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David Richardson
New member
Username: Customdavid
Post Number: 32
Registered: 1-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 - 4:45 pm: | |
Interesting to know John, thanks.
I often run into problems with images that are shot on a tripod with a pano head and have to use the "semi" method. I see this a lot when the principle content of the image has changed and PF can't deal with it.
For example, panorama at the ocean, wait for the big wave to get the "glory" shot and then the next shot has trouble matching because it was expecting a big wave shot. I end up using the semi automatic mode to resolve it. I have noticed that there is an option that says something like (sorry at work and do not have PF here) image rotated same amount. I would expect that would allow it to run without me touching it manually, but I can never get that to work.
Thoughts?
David |
John Strait
Moderator
Username: Jstrait
Post Number: 350
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 - 5:19 pm: | |
Hey David, I'm glad you brought that up.
The control you are thinking of is labeled "Rotate all images the same amount". This label might be a little misleading. This option switches between Semi-automatic and Manual stitching without going back to Wizard step 2.
Too bad I didn't think of this before. It would have made my previous advice about experimentation a little simpler!
The checkbox is labeled this way because this is what distinguishes Semi-automatic and Manual stitching. In Semi-automatic stitching, The Panorama Factory assumes that the camera rotation angles remain the same for all images. For Manual stitching, the angles are allowed to vary. This is why you need points on all image pairs for Manual but you only need one image pair for Semi-automatic. |
Matthew Donaldson
New member
Username: Mcgd
Post Number: 2
Registered: 3-2008
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 - 8:21 am: | |
Thanks John,
That worked well. I tried several different options: manual and semi-automatic, with and without letting it work out the focal length, and with various numbers of stitching points.
I found that in most cases, all of the options worked equally well. Manual and semi-automatic with just five or six stitching points on the first and last image pairs worked pretty well, but the images tended to come unstuck when doing manual warping. Putting in one or two stitching points between the other images helped to keep them together.
Semi-automatic seemed to have almost identical results to manual with the same points as used with manual - a number at each end, and one or two for the other image joins.
Letting it guess the focal length (which oddly it guessed at something like 160mm instead of 37mm), or putting in the exact length seemed to make little difference.
Strangely, in both manual and semi-automatic modes, when it got to the stage where it shows you a low-res panorama and you can manually adjust the warping, it looked very warped, and it was impossible to warp it properly with just 3 points (I'm not sure if there's a way of getting in more warping points - I couldn't find one.)
I was ready to give up, but when I let it finish off the job, it seemed to fix up the warping itself pretty well.
So anyway thanks for your advice - it does the trick nicely.
Cheers
-Matthew |
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