Stitching program (and workflow) preferences

[milt95033]

I'm a VR newbie, but a reasonably experienced digital photographer
(including some HDR work). I'd like to start doing VR by using my
existing camera (which does not have a fisheye lens). The instructions
on the panomundo site are very good, and form a solid basis for
developing my own workflow. However, I notice there is a pretty
wide variety of stitching programs available. Does everybody here
use PTMac, or are other programs used? I'd love to hear comments from
this community as to what stitching programs you use and how your
workflow might differ from that laid out on the Panomundo site.

Many thanks,

--Milt--

[pcrowley]

By far the most popular program is PTGUI, which has a mac version available. Another program, which I use, is Hugin which is a free download from http://hugin.sourceforge.net and does most everything that PTGUI does.

I have several other programs I use at various places in my workflows, depending on if it is HDR or not, etc. These are NETBPM, ImageMagick, Exiftool, DCRAW, and FDRTools.

I hope that this gives you something to think about.
-Peter

[sonicoliver]

The new Photomerge utility in Adobe CS3 is awesome for this.

just go to File > Automate > Photomerge...

I suggest using manual to drag and drop the images into place roughly, then it will do a final render. quite impressive.

simply split the result into two halves and stitch them together.

for the top and bottom, use the same technique only in a circle, like a plate. you can then use the polar co-ordinates filter to change these two plates to rectangular result and stitch them with them with the middle panorama.

there are other options, but this is quite simple and effective. you can of course use the mesh transform tool and other methods to take this further but thats the basics.

[cheathamlane]

I'm a VR newbie, but a reasonably experienced digital photographer
(including some HDR work). I'd like to start doing VR by using my
existing camera (which does not have a fisheye lens). The instructions
on the panomundo site are very good, and form a solid basis for
developing my own workflow. However, I notice there is a pretty
wide variety of stitching programs available. Does everybody here
use PTMac, or are other programs used? I'd love to hear comments from
this community as to what stitching programs you use and how your
workflow might differ from that laid out on the Panomundo site.

Many thanks,

--Milt--

Hi Milt:

I use PTGui with great success, both on my Intel & PowerPC Macs. It handles everything from my 10.5mm to 15mm to 24mm and longer with no problems.

I haven't looked through the panomundo instructions... My general workflow is to shoot (RAW, always); process RAW files to TIFF; Import to PTGui; Stitch; Export to layered, blended Photoshop file at full size; Make final adjustments to blending in Photoshop; Export to equirectangular TIFF; Export equirect to cube faces; Go!

A new-ish feature of PTGui is its Pro functionality which dummifies HDR Pano creation. Very cool.

For shooting I use the 360 Precision Absolute (Canon 5D/15mm) or the Adjuste; I also have & used the Kaidan Kiwi spherical and Manfrotto 303 Plus heads. If you plan to do many VR with the same camera/lens setup, I can't recommend the 360 Precision heads highly enough. They're not cheap, but save you lots of time.

The Nodal Ninja heads are great, too, and are a bargain compared to many other heads. You should make sure first that your proposed camera/lens combo will "fit" on the head setup.

A good and growing resource for all things VR/panorama is the IVRPA site (ivrpa.org or ivrpa.org/forum ). I'm on the board there now, but would sing its praises anyways. ;-)

Cheers,