Wizard step 4/9 – Control image quality

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In this step, you control the tradeoff between image quality and stitching speed.  In document stitching, this is Wizard step 3/7.

Automatically fine tune — Automatically applies the Fine tune command (Image menu) while stitching the panorama.

When The Panorama Factory aligns adjacent images it finds the offset that minimizes the differences between the images in the overlap region. It is rarely possible to align the images perfectly. When the images are not perfectly aligned, some portions of the overlap region will show double images called ghosts. The Fine tune command analyzes overlap region and makes local adjustments in an attempt to remove the ghosts.

Enable exposure matching — Selecting this checkbox causes The Panorama Factory to adjust the brightness of successive images to improve the agreement between the images. You should normally select this checkbox if your images were made with different exposure settings (e.g. your camera was set to automatically determine the exposure). You should normally reset this checkbox if your images were all made with the same exposure settings (e.g. you manually controlled the exposure yourself).

Enable exposure correction — Selecting this checkbox causes The Panorama Factory to adjust the overall brightness of the stitched image.  For 45-bit images, this sets the White level, Black level and Midrange on the Color tool to adjust the brightness.  For 24-bit images, this adjusts the pixel values themselves.

Make the corrected image...
<--- Darker    0    Lighter --->

If you have enabled exposure correction, select one of the radio buttons to control the overall brightness.  The center radio button adjusts the overall brightness so that the median brightness value is at 50%.  Each radio button step above or below 0 increases or decreases the median brightness.

Don't worry too much about this setting.  If your final panorama image is too light or dark, you can change the setting later by using the Blending properties dialog box.

Sharpen the final image — Selecting this checkbox causes The Panorama Factory to apply the Sharpen command (New image menu) to the final image.

Amount (percent)
         Determines the amount of sharpening.

The amount of sharpening you need may depend upon how much sharpening was done by your digital cameras.  Some cameras produce sharper pictures and some produce softer pictures.  Remember that you can change the amount of sharpening after exiting the Wizard.  If you want to change the amount later, select the sharpened image and use the Show source command (Image menu) to display the Sharpen image dialog box.

After making your image quality choices, press the Next> button to advance to the next step of the Wizard.