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Problems with AutoStitch quality

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AMAllan

AMAllan

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I know some of you, notably CilyLights, have sung the praises of AutoStitch for creating panos. Well I've tried a few times and the result is always badly out of focus even though the original photos are pretty good.

Following is an example. I took a series of photos from a lookout on the road to Nevada City, Nevada. Granted, the scene isn't exactly stunning, but it illustrates the problem.
First is a single shot I used near the middle of the pano:



Next is the completed pano which is very much OOF compared to the image shown above:



To illustrate this, the following picture is cropped from the pano at approximately the same location as the first picture shown:



See...the focus is terrible. What causes this? What should I be doing differently?
Here's another badly OOF pano from the Oregon coast.



Thanks,
--
Alastair
http://www.pbase.com/alastair
 
Alastair,

I found the same problem, now I am no expert but I found if you go to Options and under "Output size" check Scale and raise it to maybe 80 or better and under "Other Options" raise the JPEG quality to maybe 90, your mileage may vary. I had to experiment as when I raised it too high it took forever to render but the result was very good.

Hope this helps as I have found the program to work slick, better then some others I have tried: Canon Photo Stitch, Elements 5 Merge & Jasac After Shot Stitcher.
Pol
 
Performance is always relative. I praise autostitch because it is the best FREE program I have run across. It is also incredibly simple to use. But it does haveits limitations.

Some suggestions...

I see lots of JPG compression in you pano. Anytime I do a pano, I bump up the JPG quality to maximum.

Another thing, it is not the best idea to let autostitch downsize your JPG's. That will make them softer. If you want the best quality run autostitch at 100% size. Downsize in photoshop and resharpen if you want.

These two things will make the program run longer, it takes about 5 minutes to assemble a small pano on mine. Some of the larger pano's I have done, I just let it run over night.

Did I mention it is free?

I am evaluating a trial version of autopano.

http://www.autopano.net/

It is worlds better than autostitch, but it is also about $120.

Good luck!

--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
Here's my settings on Autostitch.

I tried the beach pano on these settings and it still took only about 2 minutes. The quality wasn't any better and I started with unprocessed, full size, PSE5 quality 12 jpg's.



Can you see anything wrong with the above settings?
--
Alastair
http://www.pbase.com/alastair
 
I ALWAYS use scale 100% and jpeg quality > 90%.

Never had any problem, always got awesome results (although processing time is quite long, up to 90min sometimes).

Then, I clean the image for bad stitchings (rare) contrast, light, etc...

Then finally, I downsize and compress (jpeg 80% most of the time)

Also, one thing about focus, be sure to set manual focus when you took the different photos (set to AF, focus at the desired point and switch to MF so focus doesn't change). Same with aperture and shutter speed.
 
krebss said:
I ALWAYS use scale 100% and jpeg quality > 90%.
Click to expand...
As you see, that what I was set at and this 5 pic pano took only 2 minutes. All photos were full size quality 12 out of the camera.
I'm missing something else...
krebss said:
Never had any problem, always got awesome results (although
processing time is quite long, up to 90min sometimes).

Then, I clean the image for bad stitchings (rare) contrast, light,
etc...

Then finally, I downsize and compress (jpeg 80% most of the time)

Also, one thing about focus, be sure to set manual focus when you
took the different photos (set to AF, focus at the desired point
and switch to MF so focus doesn't change). Same with aperture and
shutter speed.
Click to expand...
Thank you but that's exactly what I did in both of these; M focus and M shutter and aperture. (I learned that previously from reading this forum)
Thanks for the reply,
--
Alastair
http://www.pbase.com/alastair
 
CityLights said:
Performance is always relative. I praise autostitch because it is
the best FREE program I have run across. It is also incredibly
simple to use. But it does haveits limitations.
Click to expand...
I haven't seen too many people mentioning Hugin ( http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ ) on the forums.

I've been trying it recently, and been pretty impressed with the results. However, I haven't tried any other stitching programs (apart from the PhotoStitch which came with my Canon P&S which was poor compared to Hugin).

I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on how Hugin compares to other stitching programs, free or otherwise, Citylights if you have the time?

Here's a recent example of one I made using Hugin (not particularly high res):



--
Cheers,

Conor
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://gallery.ildica.com/
 
conorboyd said:
I haven't seen too many people mentioning Hugin
( http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ ) on the forums.
Click to expand...
I tried hugin about 2 years ago. At that time it required you to download two programs, an engine and an interface. I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

Perhaps it is improved now. I checked the website, and that has improved! It was more of a blog before.
conorboyd said:
I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on how Hugin compares to
other stitching programs, free or otherwise, Citylights if you have
the time?
Click to expand...
I will try. I think next week.

Very nice example. Wonderful light. I especially like the forground. So many people forget the forground in a pano and it really adds to the depth.
conorboyd said:
Click to expand...
--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/show_case
.
 
I also use hugin for all my pano's. I find it easy to use and very powerful. I have not considered using anything else. Hugin was the first pano program I tried (after the Canon software and Photoshop, but they are (were?) so useless they shouldn't even be mentioned). It did what I wanted to do without hassle, so I stopped looking for alternatives.

I've even done a few strange stitches that I'm not sure how other software will handle. The most difficult one was where I stitched 17 photo's of a mural in a school hallway. I had to take the photos from very close, as the hallway was only about 2 metres wide. In portait orientation at 18 mm I only just managed to get the full height of the mural. So, I walked parallel to the mural and took the shots all along the length. I ended up with 17 very badly distorted photo's. Still managed to get a good stitch with hugin.

-----
Gys
 
Thanks for the feedback, CityLights, it's appreciated!

I think the foreground thing just fell into place after I picked up on the suggestion around here to shoot pano shots portrait rather than landscape.

Be interested to hear your thoughts on Hugin if you do get a chance to compare it at some stage.

--
Cheers,

Conor
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://gallery.ildica.com/
 
I've been using them both (only maybe 10 pano on each though) and I can't really find much difference in image quality or stitching quality.

But... there is major difference when using them. Here are the quick idea that come in my mind:

Autostitch (free version):
Plus:
  • Full auto (nothing to do, just dump the photos)
  • Need 5 minutes to figure out how it works and get great panos
  • Very good stitching most of the time
Cons:
  • Can be quite long depending on the pano (90min+ for my max)
  • JPEG only
  • Normal panorama only
  • No control or almost, if any desired
  • Out of memory sometimes
Hugin:
Plus:
  • Great results (if set properly)
  • Different kinds of projection (equirectangular, stereo, pano, polar...)
  • Full control (control points, lens distortion, etc...)
  • Accept TIFF files
Cons:
  • Less easy to use but isn't that complicated after a while
  • Pano will be all mess up if you set something wrong
Basically, I use Autostitch for normal pano and can't be bother ; and Hugin when I want TIFF results (to post process or HDR if RAW photos) or when I do little planets via equirectangular + stereo projection (look for 'little planets' on flickr it's very cool).
 
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