Creating panoramas in Adobe Photoshop. Auto panorama stitching function: which program is better

The user usually deals only with a graphical add-on over a group of programs that carry out the process of stitching several frames into a single panorama. I will list the main ones of these programs and briefly formulate what they do.

• and their included library, Libpano 12, written by Dersch, and its development, Libpano 13. The main library that is used for projection conversion and distortion correction.
• - Hugin's replacement for the PTStitcher program written by Dersch. Performs geometric and photometric transformations of source images and creates and writes a script of the necessary actions to a file with the extension “*.pto”.
• - Hugin application for searching and placing control points.
• combines images into seamless panoramas.
• combines photographs taken with exposure bracketing. When input images have the same exposure, Enfuse combines their zones of sharpness.

The add-on, first of all, creates a convenient environment for working with a large number pictures. This is the placement of control points and the opportunity to evaluate intermediate results and, if necessary, intervene in automated process. The issue of convenience, like the issue of taste, is very individual, and the most delicious dishes are those that the chef knows how to prepare well. For me, the best add-on is the program, which I have already spent a lot of time studying and in its in-depth development I see more sense than in moving to another program and learning it from scratch. The program is developing steadily, and at the time of writing this article, the next version of Hugin 2011.4.0 dated December 17, 2011 was released.

The program has several windows.

When you start the program, the main window and the “Tip of the Day” window open. The main window has 9 tabs. The first tab “Assistant” allows you to immediately start working, without knowing anything about the program, and with a successful combination of circumstances, performing step by step instructions, get a decent panorama as a result.

The second tab is “Pictures”. You can upload pictures here. If the correct lens data is entered in the EXIF ​​header, then you can immediately run the cpfind control point placement program, recently made by the Hugin team, on this tab, or select another third-party program from the list. If the lens data in EXIF ​​does not correspond to reality, then you need to go to the next tab.

The “Camera and Lens” tab, in turn, has two tabs: “Geometric” and “Photometric”. The “Geometric” tab allows you to set the lens type, focal length, viewing angle, and relative matrix size. In addition, if known, coefficients describing distortions can be specified. If these coefficients are not specified, then during full optimization they will be calculated and can be stored for future use.

The “Camera and Lens / Photometric” tab allows you to set parameters characterizing vignetting, exposure correction and white balance.

The “Cropping” tab allows you to crop those areas of the frame that should not be included in panorama stitching. This is especially important if you are using a Circular Fisheye lens.

The “Mask” tab allows you to specify areas for each frame that must be excluded or, conversely, must be used. Alternative solution: on the last tab “Panorama assembly”, check the box “reprojected images” and then graphic editor upload to new layer the correct photograph, after which, using a mask, we combine its fragment with the rest of the panorama.

The “Control points” tab allows you to place control, i.e., coinciding, points for adjacent frames. If automatic placement was used, delete those placed incorrectly. The latter process can be partially automated by clicking on the Celeste button, which launches a program that removes control points tied to the clouds in the sky.

“Optimization” tab. If the panorama was taken without parallax and the lens parameters are set correctly, then select the “Positions” item (incrementally, starting from a fixed image). If the lens parameters are set approximately, then you should try to improve the result by selecting the following items: “Position and view”, “Positions and barrel”, “Positions, view and barrel” and “All without transfer”. The “Positions and transfer” item is used to compensate for parallax and special cases when, for example, a large poster is removed in parts. In particular, this method allows you to remove the column during stitching, which partially covers the poster when shooting from one point. By taking two photographs in which the column covers different areas of the poster, and selecting it in the “Mask” tab, you can completely exclude the column from the resulting panorama.

The “Exposure” tab is responsible for aligning frames by exposure and white balance. If the panorama was shot with a constant exposure for all frames, then this operation is necessary mainly to eliminate vignetting. There may be problems optimizing images taken with the Circular Fisheye Lens.

The “Panorama Build” tab determines the projection size and output format of the panorama. You can also specify the sequence of operations when stitching a panorama from frames taken with exposure bracketing.

Hugin allows you to open two preview windows.

View window without hardware acceleration allows you to select a projection, perform basic cropping and alignment operations, and also include or exclude individual images from the panorama. In auto update mode it is slow and is usually used in manual mode when the “Update” button is clicked after setting the parameters. If “Panorama viewing with hardware acceleration” functions normally, then there is no need to open this window.

The “Hardware Accelerated Panorama Viewer” window is significantly more functional and has several tabs.

The “Placement” tab allows you to visually analyze possible problems with joining of individual frames.

The “Projection” tab allows you to quickly view the result in different projections.

The preview window allows you to center the panorama by pressing the left mouse button, and by pressing the right mouse button, you can rotate the panorama.

A separate group of programs consists of programs for viewing panoramas on a computer. These are actually players for viewing on a local machine or via the Internet and converters that convert the original panorama into the format required by the players. To view it on a local machine, I chose the program, it completely suits me, but, unfortunately, it is not compatible with all video cards and, therefore, is not suitable for everyone. For Internet presentations of small and medium-sized panoramas, I settled on the PTViewer program, written at the beginning of the century by Helmut Dersch. It uses Java technology and has good capabilities for creating interactive presentations. To present giant panoramas, I convert the panoramas into a format and use technology-based Flash program. I devoted a comparison of several programs to “Review of several ways to present spherical panoramas.” To convert from one format to another, I usually use the programs and .

P.S.

The technology of panorama stitching has had a significant impact on all modern digital photography. Software aberration correction uses the same mathematical apparatus and to describe lenses, coefficients are used that are obtained by correctly stitching a panorama with optimization in all parameters. I wrote about this in more detail in the article “Lenses with a focal length of 14 mm”. Hugin 2011.2.0 includes separate program Hugin Lens Calibration GUI for lens calibration. It does not require precise shooting of a parallax-free panorama, but, in my opinion, it is ineffective for Fisheye lenses. It works poorly with real objects and ideally requires a specially drawn table. The program can work with one or several images. It has a custom edge detection algorithm. The search for lines is started with the “Find lines” button. Next, the program finds straight lines in the image, from which it calculates the variables for the inverse transformation formula.

You can view and delete unnecessary lines in the “Edge detection” viewing mode. When you left-click on the green line, it turns red and is excluded from the calculations. Right-clicking turns the red line into green.

We tick the parameters that need to be optimized and click the “Optimize” button. The result of the adjustment can be seen in the “Corrected” view mode.

Perhaps the most common program that directly uses the coefficients obtained by stitching panoramas is the library. It is used, in particular, in the well-known converter.

In addition, the technology of combining images, developed in panoramas, is used when combining stacks with different exposures or focus points. For example, in graphical interface for the Enfuse program.

To add geotags, you will need to copy EXIF ​​tags from the original frames to the final panorama. I do it like this:

$ exiftool -tagsfromfile first-frame.jpg panorama.jpg

What else can you do with a panorama?

One of the most interesting panoramic communities, in my opinion, is the Perfect Panoramas group on Flickr. Only those panoramas are accepted there in which the moderators do not find any defects.

There is a photo community on LiveJournal, also dedicated to panoramas. I don't remember what it's called.

Panoramas with geotags are the place to be on Panoramio. Good panoramas will then be shown on Google Earth :)

Panoramas can be displayed on the Internet using the PTViewer applet.

Update 2010-02: Since writing this note, a good panoramic hosting pan0.net has appeared. You can post both circular and partial panoramas on it. There is a Flash viewer that can be easily inserted into blogs.

Perfectionists and lovers of monumental art can shoot gigapixel panoramas.

Well, in general, there are still many different applications of this technique. Including quite serious ones.

PS. I found two more similar guides in Russian: Gluing a panorama by Alexander Prokudin and Gluing panoramas in Hugin (© BeZhe). available on the Hugin program website, but, alas, only in English.

Photo panoramas are one of the best ways demonstrate to users all the nuances of what is happening, show the object “from the inside,” and so on. Introducing 6 free tools to create photo panoramas.

Image Composite Editor, created by Microsoft, is the most simple program in use. Image Composite Editor can create panoramas from both photos and videos.

The program contains four buttons at the top that guide you through each stage of the process - Import, Splice, Trim and Export. On the right you will see options that can further enhance the panorama. You can export your file to many file formats with different settings quality. Remember to change the Quality in the drop-down menu to Superb before exporting your panorama.

Ease of use: 5
Capabilities: 6
Result: 5

The photo gallery built into Windows 7 and 8 is primarily an organization program with useful tagging features and basic editing capabilities.

One feature that is not usually associated with Photo Gallery is the creation of panoramic images. Surprisingly, this program is one of the simplest to create them.

To create a panorama, drag and drop individual photos into the Photo Gallery. Then select them, click the Create tab at the top, and then click Panorama and wait for the program to merge the photos. You will be prompted to save the panorama to your computer without any preview.

Ease of use: 5
Possibilities: 2
Result: 4

After launching Autostitch, click on the folder icon and upload your photos. The program will automatically stitch them together to create a panorama.

Ease of use: 4
Possibilities: 3
Result: 3

Hugin is an advanced panorama editing program. It allows you to stitch together photos taken with different cameras, and even several rows of photos (top and bottom) to create a large panorama. There are also options for calibrating lenses and creating 360° panoramas.

No other program has such capabilities.

After importing images, you need to accurately align them, then manually clear them of errors that the program itself will find. Only after this Hugin will start working.

Ease of use: 2
Possibilities: 5
Result: 5

Dermandar is a website that stitches your photos together in a couple of clicks.

Go to the website and choose from two options (360-degree view or wide-angle). Now select and upload your photos, then wait a few seconds for the tool to stitch them together. As a result, you will get an excellent result that you can drag with your mouse from one edge to the other. Click the Fullscreen icon ( full screen) to expand the image. The Options button allows you to download the file to your computer in JPEG format.

Ease of use: 5
Possibilities: 2
Result: 5

Google Photos has quickly become the default photo storage service for millions of users. It works on Android, iOS, as a website and even as a computer program. After uploading photos appears useful feature assistant The assistant analyzes your photos and looks for ways to improve them - whether it's creating a story from photos taken from around the same location, or adding effects to individual photos.

The assistant automatically detects adjacent photos taken from the same point and stitches them together to create a panorama.

Ease of use: 0
Possibilities: 0

I recently returned from a vacation I spent in sunny Turkey, and brought back many beautiful landscape photographs, some of which I created specifically for later “gluing” into panoramas.

After the initial processing of photographs in LightRoom, I switched to the PanoramaStudio v 1.6 program, which I have been using until now. Well, what can I say... I wasn’t able to stitch together most of the pictures, the stitching algorithms were clearly slipping, so I was faced with the question - what program will help me compose a panorama in a high-quality manner? As a result, the practical part of solving this issue turned into a small test of various software products dealing with panoramic photographs. So, I tried the automatic splicing modes of programs such as PTGui v. 8.1.2 Pro, PanoramaStudio 2 Pro and Autopano Pro v. 1.4.2.

I compared the performance of the above-mentioned programs in auto mode, since this is how I intended to assemble the panoramic parts into a single whole.

As test material, I chose three options for landscape shots - with vegetation, sea and mountains, as well as two options for evening shots with sunsets, sea and sky.

The shooting was not ideal initially, since I did not have a tripod, so the horizon line, quite understandably, was not fixed; in addition, I leveled the exposure purely intuitively. Also, during shooting I used a polarizing filter, so the sky has uneven color. I also used EGF=28 mm, so the foreground objects were slightly distorted (parallax, I think smart people call it :-)

All programs coped with the first series of images without any significant differences, with quite decent quality. Three horizontal photographs with significant overlap and uniform exposure were used as sources.

After that, I used the same series of shots again, but in six vertically oriented parts. Again, all programs coped with the assigned task, but, it seems to me, in the case of PTGui, the sky acquired some spottiness. However, see for yourself:

The third landscape, overlooking mountain ranges and Turkish zucchini. In this case, PanoramaStudio 2 Pro clearly hit the mark:

Whereas ideally the gluing should look something like this:

It's time for sunset photos. This panorama had to be combined from three vertically oriented frames. The first difficulty that had to be overcome was to overcome the distortion that arose due to the fact that I was working at 28 mm, while raising the optics above the horizon line, so that the cloud was included. Another problem is sea waves, which move dynamically and change the relief of the water surface every second so that the misalignment of parts in the places where the images are glued will be visible even to an inexperienced eye. As a result, PTGui produced its own solution, which turned out worse than everyone else’s:

PanoramaStudio 2 Pro and Autopano Pro v. 1.4.2 also proposed their own options, similar to each other, but which could only be called good with great reserve. Judge for yourself:

And finally, the next views with sunset, from five pictures. PanoramaStudio 2 Pro again produced a stupid result:

PTGui did the same thing, which again could not cope with the horizon docking. Autopano Pro v produced a more or less acceptable result. 1.4.2:

Resume:

It turned out that in terms of auto-gluing, PanoramaStudio 2 Pro is clearly not well prepared. I agree, its interface is simple and unpretentious, pictures are collected quickly and if the plot is not too complicated, the result is quite good. But still not always...

PTGui v. 8.1.2 Pro holds the title as a powerful and deservedly popular panoramic tool, but in automatic mode it behaves like a bull in a china shop.

In principle, the winner of our tests can be called Autopano Pro v. 1.4.2. The program has a simple and, most importantly, Russian-language interface, and also additional options for manual adjustment of gluing, so I decided to continue using it for these purposes.

You may ask me, what about Photoshop? I tried the CS2 version and didn’t like it, the stitching mode is clearly weak, for example, this program couldn’t cope with Turkish eateries. But this is purely my subjective opinion...

Previously, I stitched panoramas using a program from the camera manufacturer. Often the quality of stitching pictures into one large canvas left much to be desired - especially when stitching pictures with slightly different exposures. I tried to make a panorama in special program for stitching panoramic images. For example, free program HUGIN 7.0 does stitching of frames very efficiently, especially when all control points are set manually, but it is very time-consuming.

Great stitching opportunity panoramic shots appeared in the version Adobe Photoshop CS3. And I want to say that stitching a series of panoramic photographs has become surprisingly easy. The panorama stitcher built into Photoshop does not allow you to control the process manually, but the speed and simplicity of the work captivates any photographer starting out in panoramic photography. And the quality is quite good high level. At least I liked the balance between speed and quality. And most importantly, Photoshop can level the exposure on an already stitched panorama - also automatically!

I found in my photo archive three photographs of not the best quality, however, in order to show you how easy it is to make a panorama using Photoshop, they are quite suitable. These are the photos:

IMG_8692

IMG_8693

Stitching panoramic photos

Step by step instructions for Photoshop CS3

1. Loading panoramic photos into Photoshop

Before you start merging panoramic images into one panoramic photo, launch Photoshop and open all the files that will make up your panorama at once:

• select a team File > Open... (File > Open...)
• in the window that opens, select everything necessary files photos and press the OPEN button

If you are going to stitch a panorama consisting of more than three frames, I advise you to align all the pictures at once: Window > Arrange... > Cascade (Window > Align... > Cascade).

As a result, we get this kind of Photoshop with downloaded files:

2. Create a panorama file

We create new file in which we will collect our panorama, so in the request window when creating a file, enter the required dimensions With (width) and Height (height) - select on the taskbar File > Open... (File > Open...) or simply press Ctrl+N. We transfer all the layers of photographs for the panorama to the newly created layer, and it is not necessary to align the new layers resulting from the transfer in any way.

3. Start automatic stitching of panoramic images

Before running the command for stitching panoramic images, you must select all the layers involved in the panorama. To do this, hold down Shift key, “click” on the first and last layers participating in the panorama - all intermediate layers will be selected automatically.

Only after this can you start automatic panorama stitching:

• choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers...
  (Edit > Auto-Align Layers)
• in the window that opens, select the alignment mode (panorama stitching projection) and click OK

In most cases automatic mode works very correctly, but if you don’t know exactly how the stitched panoramic images were taken, try all panorama projection modes:

• Auto [auto],
• Perspective [perspective panorama],
• Celindrical [cylindrical panorama],
• Reposition only [positioning only]

After this, the process of analyzing and directly stitching the layers into one panoramic layer begins:

The processing speed depends on the power of your computer, the number of photographs in the panorama, their quality and size. After completing this command, you will have a panorama like this:

If frame joints are noticeable due to exposure differences, use another feature of Adobe Photoshop: select all the layers from which the panorama is stitched and run the command Edit > Auto-Blend Layers (Edit > Auto-Blend Layers), the result of which will be the appearance of masks on the layers subjected to exposure equalization.

That's all, all that remains is to flatten the layers and crop the finished panoramic photo.

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