Looking for recommendations for really good panorama-stiching software, please. We are just getting back from 2 weeks in the SW National parks, and have a number of correctly-overlapped images to create panoramas. Sometimmes as many as 15-20 images to stitch .
Thanks!
Sandy
Sandy, can't say I'm aware of issues with PS and that many images, as I've used it numerous times with as many as 4 images without any problems at all. I'm sure there are several other products out there and let's just see what others might have used to date.
Just with PS I have had success stitching subsets, then stitching the stitched subsets.
Posted by Keith Bauer on October 22, 2016 at 6:49 PM
Photoshop works well, Lightroom probably makes it even easier.
Posted by Gary Minish on October 23, 2016 at 1:17 AM
Sandy,
I do lots of panoramas and my favorite software, by far is Kolor's Autopano Giga (http://www.kolor.com/autopano/). Once you get through the learning curve on the setup/configuration all you have to do is put your overlapping photos in their own folder and point the program to it. It will stitch them into a draft version that you can use to crop, rotate, change projection, etc. and then it will render the full size version. It corrects ghosting (caused by duplicate objects such as people that show up in both overlapping frames), corrects colors to compensate for white balance differences between shots, equalizes brightness differences between shots, deals with different angles between frames (from hand held shooting) and a whole lot more. It can create 360° videos, multiple image HDRs and HUGE gigapanos. I have a number of panoramas that are made from 3 or 4 vertical rows of 10 or more shots and those are tiny compared to some panoramas that people post on their site. With rare exceptions, the stitching is seamless and the final image looks like a single photo. It handles mis-aligned images so well that I rarely use a tripod to shoot panoramas anymore. Probably 95% of my panos were shot handheld. It makes it so easy that when I don't have a wide enough lens for a large scene I will simply turn the camera vertical and shoot a row of images or if that doesn't cover the scene I'll shoot another row above or below the first. The resulting images are actually much nicer than using a wide angle lens because they don't have the distortion and they are much higher resolution.
Posted by Allen Brooks on October 24, 2016 at 1:31 PM
Sandy,
For what it's worth, LR seems to do a good job. This shot of Mt. St. Helens consisted of five verticals and it was hand held and LR did a great job of stitching them together.
Discussion
5 repliesThanks!
Sandy
I do lots of panoramas and my favorite software, by far is Kolor's Autopano Giga (http://www.kolor.com/autopano/). Once you get through the learning curve on the setup/configuration all you have to do is put your overlapping photos in their own folder and point the program to it. It will stitch them into a draft version that you can use to crop, rotate, change projection, etc. and then it will render the full size version. It corrects ghosting (caused by duplicate objects such as people that show up in both overlapping frames), corrects colors to compensate for white balance differences between shots, equalizes brightness differences between shots, deals with different angles between frames (from hand held shooting) and a whole lot more. It can create 360° videos, multiple image HDRs and HUGE gigapanos. I have a number of panoramas that are made from 3 or 4 vertical rows of 10 or more shots and those are tiny compared to some panoramas that people post on their site. With rare exceptions, the stitching is seamless and the final image looks like a single photo. It handles mis-aligned images so well that I rarely use a tripod to shoot panoramas anymore. Probably 95% of my panos were shot handheld. It makes it so easy that when I don't have a wide enough lens for a large scene I will simply turn the camera vertical and shoot a row of images or if that doesn't cover the scene I'll shoot another row above or below the first. The resulting images are actually much nicer than using a wide angle lens because they don't have the distortion and they are much higher resolution.
For what it's worth, LR seems to do a good job. This shot of Mt. St. Helens consisted of five verticals and it was hand held and LR did a great job of stitching them together.