I've used PTGui for making panoramas for almost 5 years. Perhaps
because I don't make very many panos, I've only previously encountered
one problem and that was clearly due to motion between frames. But last
night I tried to make a seven frame pano of Grand Island, Michigan which
was driving PTGui over the edge. It insisted that the leftmost frame
(which contained an orange building) was tied to four of the other six
frames despite only one of them containing part of the same building.
Despite its complaints the preview image it built looked correct. But
allowing it to go ahead and build the final output only resulted in a
ridiculous looking mess.
To be fair, I hadn't used a tripod and I wasn't particularly careful
with the shots. After examining the two frames with the orange building
I realized there was only about 15% overlap and I usually try for about
30%. Also, some of the key points on the building (such as window frame
corners) were obscured by leaves. I decided to help it out by manually
positioning the two frames with the building, making a small pano from
that and then feeding that into a new pano with the remaining frames.
Didn't work. It just created a different looking mess with blurry
streaks of the orange building appearing several times across the final
pano. I think it somehow decided that the patterns in the trees and
leaves were more important than the bright orange.
Frustrated, I finally decided to give PhotoShop CS3's photomerge a try.
I'd never previously used it since I didn't have to. It build a near
perfect pano on the first try but I noticed that the horizon had a
slight bow downwards in the middle. So I changed to (I think it was) a
cylindrical mapping from the auto mode and all was well. I was
impressed. All done with no fuss and with good performance. Recommended.
Chuck Norcutt
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