Some time ago I posted a many-shot pano of Ubehube Crater in Death Valley. At the time I could not reveal what I used to make it. Well, I can now say.
In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Microsoft (but not in the marketing / sales department). In that capacity, I often have the opportunity to try out new software well before the general public. Last May, Microsoft Research made one of their projects available for use by Microsoft employees. That project was for stitching software.
Now for the really cool part. To produce that Crater pano, all I had to do was select the shots that went into the mosaic. It did not matter which order they were selected in. After selection, press Run. That's it! No preliminary measurement of pitch, yaw, roll, or the lens used. No marking of points that adjacent shots had in common. Nothing! The software would analyze the patterns in each shot, then, like a jigsaw puzzle, figure out which pieces fit together. If it finds a shot that it can't match, it sets it aside for you to insert later or discard if it doesn't belong. Jeffrey actually saw me do it so, as the saying goes, "I have a witness".
Anyway, the stitching software is now just a feature of the just-released Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10. As far as I can see, the only limitation is that the final pano cannot exceed 53 Mpixels (as I recall). If you create a pano larger, it will ask you to select a small, medium, or large pano setting rather than the default "actual" setting.
I've included a 5-shot pano for your inspection. I've intentionally made it rather large and not processed the heck out of it. I can not find any stitch lines, can you? I'm not particularly interested in the merits (or demerits) of the picture.
Pretty neat, Don. The pano looks fine to me. Not sure I would buy the software just for the stitching though...
How does the software deal with more difficult stitching situations? Like a very wide shot, or a shot with some parallax? I have used other automated tools that do fine on panos where everything is far away and there are no tricky spots, but they have difficulty with the complex stuff. I also wonder how it would handle some of my Muir Woods tree panos that went from the ground to way overhead...
Well, I am impressed! Did they happen to mention what the MSRP will be for this software?
Also, not sure if you can answer this but why only 53 MB? If you wanted to stitch four Mark II files for a simple horizontal panoramic, wouldn't that far exceed this limit, if shot in Raw, saved to Tiff as a 16-bit file? I never swore to be a mathematician, so I would not know.
Charles, I've only tried it on 4 panos, now. One of them was a retry of the Ubehebe Crater, i.e., a mosaic. The ghosting issues that were present last May now seem to be taken care of because the registration looked great. I don't know about the parallax issue nor how it handles color blending as that was not an issue in my tests.
Carl, don't know the MSRP but a quick check on the web mentions prices in the $80-90 range. I didn't say 53 MB, I said 53 Mpixel. So for the Mark II that's almost 9 shots. You can stitch more but the final resolution will be cut back a bit. I have no idea why the restriction. I will make my wishes known internally but ...
Thanks, Dan. I'm glad you didn't take a too critical eye, though. As I say, there was quite a lot of poor registration in that one.
I would be VERY curious to see how it deals with blue sky blending. Some of the Yosemite panos I am dealing with right now have horrible seam blending issues, even with locked exposure and WB (not sure why.) Parallax is also a critical issue.
Does it work with 16-bit TIFFs, Don?
It does look very promising. I think we are just now entering the "adolescence" of stitching software... --c
Don, I just downloaded the manual for this product and aside from a reference to a "panoramic stitch tool" in a sidebar, there's no information about how stitching works .. --c
Charles, my guess is that they don't feel that it is significant enough to tout for the market that they are aimed at. I may end up using just that feature, I don't know yet. At this point, I've not used any other feature.
Was just having trouble in blending blue skies in my pano attempts using cs.. and looking for a better tool. Your examples do look promising...!
Thanks for the info!
How would you rate this in terms of quality of finished product to Pano Tools and PT Assembler? I know you have done some interesting peices in the past with PTA and, of course, there is Max Lyon's work. I fnid it does a great job, although rather laborious! If this is it's equal, I would find it hard to not use it. And as for the size limit, Just build 2 or three (or more?) mini panos with it and then do a final assembly with PTA or Hugin and use Emblend to average out any differances in exposure.
In that capacity, I often have the opportunity to try out new software well before the general public. Last May, Microsoft Research made one of their projects available for use by Microsoft employees. That project was for stitching software.
