Orig­i­nal­ly Post­ed: Jan­u­ary 9, 2020
Updat­ed: July 25, 2022

Introduction

In my post about 5 dif­fer­ent meth­ods to obtain­ing large for­mat stitched imagery, I spoke about the var­i­ous ways to achieve image cap­ture for high-res­o­lu­tion imagery.

While there are plen­ty of tuto­ri­als on the Inter­net that cov­er how to use the var­i­ous soft­ware pack­ages, choose a pro­jec­tion type, blend & ren­der mech­a­nism type, etc., this arti­cle cov­ers the tools I uti­lize “post image cap­ture” to assem­ble the indi­vid­ual frames. Essen­tial­ly pro­vid­ing a gen­er­al overview of my approach to pro­duc­ing my high-res­o­lu­tion imagery.

Take it for what it is, and don’t for­get to search for some of the tuto­ri­als; it’s how I start­ed this pho­to­graph­ic process 10 years ago.

General Workflow

As with any good work­flow, it evolves… and over the past ten years-ish, my work­flow for my high-res­o­lu­tion stitch­ing has evolved and become refined as the soft­ware pack­ages, com­put­ing hard­ware, and my gen­er­al skills have progressed.

Below is a quick overview of my gen­er­al work­flow; the descrip­tion fol­lows the chart.
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1. Image Cap­ture
2. Asset Inges­tion — (2a) Phase 1, (2b) Phase 2
3. Asset Meta Data Processing
4. Image Pro­cess­ing
5. Export Source Images
6. Assem­ble, Cor­rect, Choose Pro­jec­tion, Render
7. Post Ren­der­ing Final Image Processing
8. Ingest final work
9. Done — Export Final Image to the web­site for dis­play or send to the print­er for fine art print.

AutoPano Giga

http://www.kolor.com/image-stitching-software-autopano-giga.html

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As you can see by the pho­tos in the screen­shots above, the images have vary­ing degrees of suc­cess in ini­tial detec­tion and pro­jec­tion.  The sec­ond screen­shot shows the editing/tuning screen of Autopano Giga, which allows for a pletho­ra of choic­es for straight­en­ing, pro­jec­tions, and oth­er cor­rec­tions to an image before ren­der­ing for final out­put.  Auto Pano Giga has a small arse­nal of options for ren­der out­put which I will write about anoth­er time.

While I bring in the source images as 16-bit TIFFs, I usu­al­ly ren­der them direct­ly to Pho­to­shop Large For­mat 16-bit (.PSB).

For ref­er­ence pur­pos­es, you can see the final images for a) Lahaina Canoe b) Lake Min­newan­ka Win­ter and c) The Shear Scale of Hub­bard Glac­i­er by click­ing each link.

PTGUI also offers a vari­ety of tools and options that do essen­tial­ly the same how­ev­er the tools do have some unique options to each soft­ware package.

PTGUI

http://www.ptgui.com/

PTGUI has been my defac­to stan­dard for many years, I start­ed with the tool in 2005/2006 and have kept up my sub­scrip­tion for rough­ly 10years-ish.

When I con­vert­ed to Autopano Giga in 2011 it was due most­ly to help aid rapid mul­ti-pano gen­er­a­tion with my Giga­pan Epic Pro.  As of late 2013, I have recent­ly returned to uti­liz­ing PTGUI for many of my 360 degree immer­sive panora­mas as I find the mask­ing, options and tools pro­vid­ed by PTGUI to be con­sis­tent­ly more suc­cess­ful for my dif­fi­cult immer­sives than AutoPano Giga.  Per­haps its due to my in-depth under­stand­ing of the inner work­ings of this tool.

Regard­less I still uti­lize this PTGUI with excel­lent success.

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Final Words

As with any tool set, or jour­ney… you must find what works for you and rarely does one shoe fit all.

I have remained gen­er­al­ly steady with main­stream tools over the 10 years, with minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions here, a few refine­ments there and a set of enhance­ments as new ideas, chal­lenges and goals came my way.

There are no short­age of tools out there that can accom­plish this work (Com­mand line pano tools for exam­ple), and I have eval­u­at­ed a great many of them; in the end these tools are my choice to suc­cess­ful stitch­ing regard­less of the cam­era I use, or the method I use to cap­ture the many frames.