Photo Stitching Software

[RonVol]

A while ago I started to use photo stitching software and am amazed at the possibilities.

In our spare time; my wife & I search for ancient Australian aboriginal rock engraving sites.
Most of the sites are in remote locations and so require several hours of bashing through the Australian bush.
The sites can get quite large, making it difficult to photograph them.
Ideally, the best way would be to use a drone............but lugging around a drone for hours on-end isn't worth the effort.

So we're trying the stitching method.
The images below (one highlights the engravings) are made up of well over 100 individual shots and are then assembled in a really neat program by Microsoft 'Image Composite Editor'. Oh and the best part, the software is free for windows users 
The area shown is roughly 6 meters x 4 meters.

Images were shot with a D7000 & AF-Nikkor 50mm f/1.4.

[FredCrowBear]

Very cool hobby! 

Here is the website at Microsoft Research for the Image Composite Editor (ICE)

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/ice/

[Øivind Tøien]

The nice thing about Microsoft ICE is that it requires almost no work at all, not even sorting the images in correct order. It either works (most of the time) or not, and in the latter case there is little to do about it except perhaps trying a different projection. I have even stitched fisheye images with no or only minimal errors. It is really good at leveling out transitions in the sky.

[Frank Fremerey]

I used autostitch in the beginning.

Then kolor.com licensed this engine and created the amazing APG

[Bjørn Rørslett]

PTGui has long been my weapon of choice for stitching.

It doesn't mind massive projects such as stitching 200 images with D800 16-bit TIFs. And it aligns the sequence by itself.

[Ron Scubadiver]

I guess the guy at the bottom was a surfer.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

My own thoughts exactly. They started this in pre-historic times?

[Frank Fremerey]

I guess the guy at the bottom was a surfer.

Then the upper guy was that Rapper with a duck mask...

Is there a scale?

[Frank Fremerey]

PTGui has long been my weapon of choice for stitching. It doesn't mind massive projects such as stitching 200 images with D800 16-bit TIFs. And it aligns the sequence by itself.

I did not try PTGui for a while, but 600 24 MP files were no problem for Kolor's APG even on my old machine and It takes multiple cores very well.

The biggest output file I created so far was 11,4 Gigabytes (and I only had 8 GB of RAM ant that time).

[Bjørn J]

I have used PTGUI as my primary stitching software. It's fast and reliable, but sometimes it gets confused, as this photo shows. A stitch of two images taken with Nikkor 16mm/3,5
I have heard very good things abbout Microsoft ICE, and I have downloaded it and will try it out.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

PTGui relies on finding "control points", ie. identifiable points common to two or more frames. With expanses of sky or water, that automated process can fail, with weird results. However, usually the program asks for human intervention in placing control points if it cannot locate these itself.

[Akira]

Ron and Fred, thanks for the introduction to the ICE!

Downloaded and tried to stitch 10 NEFs from D750 with Ai 20/4.0.  I did the same stitch in Photomerge of CC2015 a few days ago.  Compared to that, ICE is about 10x (or more!) slower in stitching the images.  But it requires only 1/3 of memory and less than half of CPU power, and the image rotation is a breeze (probably because the displayed image is a resized intermediate one).

The resulted pano image is noticeably better than that of Photomerge.  The ICE image has less glitches, and the CA seems to be corrected during the process.

I'm not pro and not in need of stitching quickly.  So, I will continue to try it.  On my Windows 10 machine with Core i5 6500T (Skylake) and 16GB RAM, it worked flawlessly.  I'm not sure if the slow speed is caused by the compatibility issue, though.

[Ron Scubadiver]

I have used PTGUI as my primary stitching software. It's fast and reliable, but sometimes it gets confused, as this photo shows. A stitch of two images taken with Nikkor 16mm/3,5
I have heard very good things abbout Microsoft ICE, and I have downloaded it and will try it out.

What lovely confusion, it looks like the end of the world.

[Akira]

What lovely confusion, it looks like the end of the world.

The area of high latitude is indeed the end of the world.