I've always had a thing for panoramas, but whenever I'd tried to find a good toolchain for creating them, I was always disappointed. I mostly used Canon Photostitch, which came with my Elph 230. However, I just took another look at the state of affairs in panorama software, and boy, things have improved drastically!

In the commercial space, I poked at PTGui and Autopano Pro. Both did a pretty reasonable job of things with a couple of test panoramas. PTGui's interface was much simpler, and worked pretty decently, but didn't allow quite the same amount of control as Autopano Pro. Plus, Autopano will take a folder full of images and pick out the panoramas for you!

I did find that Autopano's blending algorithm did not deal well at all with objects that moved in the foreground. It just blends them together, resulting in a horrible blurry mess. You can fix this by saving the results as a multi-layer Photoshop file (a process it makes very easy), the specifically picking from some of the source layers to override the blend layer.

Even more progress has been made in the open source world, however. There is actually a useable open source toolchain now! Not just usable, actually decent! You need three separate programs:

• autopano-sift to automatically line up your images.
• hugin to fine tune the alignment and generate the warped images.
• enblend to blend the warped and placed images.

Of course, this being open source the programs are not really the easiest to use, and require a lot of manual attention to set everything up just right. But the results are great and they even all run under MacOS (with the Mono runtime). Things promise to soon get even better, as hugin/panotools has just received five interns from the Google Summer of Code program.

Enblend does a simply wonderful job. Even with impossible to blend objects in the foreground, it intelligently finds seams and picks one image rather than blending contentious areas. Plus, since the warp and blend steps are separate you can open the intermediate files in the photo editor of your choice and alter the alpha channel to mask out certain areas. This allows you exercise great control over which source image various bits of the panorama come from.

All in all, I'd heartily recommend both Autopano Pro for those who want fairly hands off stitching (and don't mind paying €99) and the open source tools for those who want to exercise OCD-level control over the whole process.

I've only scratched the surface here. There is a ton of good information out there; I found the Panotools wiki to be a great starting point. And of course, the obligatory photo:

posted: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:34 | permanent link to this entry