Filed under: Software, Reviews, Graphic Design
Super-panoramic showdown for Mac
There are several photo-stitchers available for Mac (and several for iPhone as well), and most do a stellar job for stitching together 3-4 images into a panoramic image. However, I recently completed a project that required stitching together hundreds of images into some very large panoramas of several locations around beautiful Peoria, Illinois. What I found is that some of the programs which do admirable work on small stitching jobs performed very poorly on larger-scale panoramas. I tried several programs with varying results, and you can check out my showdown below.
Photoshop
As they say, the best tool is the one you have. I already had Photoshop installed, so giving it a shot was a no-brainer. I went into File > Automate > Photomerge as I've done several times on a smaller scale and with a lot of success. I loaded in the 103 10-megapixel images I had taken for the task and hit "OK". My computer's fans immediately sped up to high-gear. Photoshop went through the automated process of opening up all the images, copying and pasting and aligning them into a brand new image with 103 layers. The process took over an hour to complete, but when finished I was moderately happy with the results. It wasn't seamless, but it was pretty good.
The problem was in my computer's performance. With this massive file open, I was unable to do anything useful with my computer at all. Even moving the mouse around the screen seemed to make my computer choke. Forget trying to make any menu selections or flatten the image. I assume the CPU was maxed out, but I certainly couldn't open Activity Monitor to see. I figured I would just take a screenshot of the result to save for this article, but upon completing the familiar keyboard shortcut, the computer crashed, and crashed hard. I should have predicted that.
Hugin
From the Hugin Gallery it seemed like this open-source piece of software would do exactly what I needed it to do. It looked very full-featured and it was free to boot! They even offer a great set of tutorials to get started on your own panoramics. And did I mention it's free?
The thing this program lacked is automated tasks. Don't get me wrong, there is some automation built-in, but any manual intervention with this many images made the process much more time-consuming than I was interested in. The program also lacked the fine polish that I am used to with my Mac applications, from the ugly icons and clunky interface to way too many options in dealing with things like yaw, pitch, roll, and radial distortions to name just a few. I am by no means a professional photographer, so while some people may appreciate the fine-tuning and manual intervention this program offers, I found it too overwhelming and time-consuming.
DoubleTake
DoubleTake solved many of the problems Hugin faced. The interface was very simplistic and Mac-like, with easily understood options and nice looking interface. The drag and drop interface was much friendlier than Hugin's input and, most of all, the program was easy to use and understand.
However, as the name implies, DoubleTake truly shines when working with just 2 photos. I'm sure more could be used, but the program seemed confused by the 103 images I threw at it. I know it's difficult to tell from the thumbnail above, but DoubleTake stitched the images together in a way that resembled an orange peel. It did not detect multiple rows. It did an admirable job of stitching horizontally, but the program seemed a bit vertically challenged. Still, for its intended use of just a handful of photos, it seems well worth the $24.95US asking price. For super-panos with multiple rows, my search continued.
Calico
However, it fell short on the super-panoramic challenge. It seemed at about halfway through the alignment process, it just sort of gave up and starting laying images on top of other images, each with a different opacity, leaving me with the weird abstract image above. I can't recommend this if you're hoping to stitch together a super-panoramic, but if you'd like to give it a shot, you can buy it for $39US, or test it out with the trial version.
Autopano Pro
Autopano Pro is expensive at €99 (approximately $150US), but it was the only software I tried that was capable of doing what I needed it to do. 103 images seemed to be no problem for this little application, stitching them together in just about 20 minutes with absolutely no input or tweaking from me. All of the programs above maxed out my computer during the stitching process making it unusable for other tasks, and Autopano Pro was no different.
However, the results speak for themselves. Autopano was used to generate the main image up top of this article, and with the exception of cropping and resizing via Photoshop, the image is just as Autopano Pro created. There is some color banding that is easily fixable, but after my long search I cannot tell you how happy I am with the results. I'd started to think that there would be no program that could stitch together the photos I wanted automatically, but Autopano Pro proved me wrong.
There is a trial version available, so give it a shot before dropping the coinage on the application. It is expensive and it's very much a one-trick-pony, but if you've got one of these super-panoramics to make I haven't found a better tool.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
SFuller said 11:58AM on 11-21-2009
I've been very pleased with the results from PTgui (http://www.ptgui.com/). It has a cheaper and a more expensive version. It was worth the costs to get better results than the software that came with my camera.
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scott.quincy said 2:12PM on 11-21-2009
Um, when will I ever need to do this? One hundred and three photos? Geez.
If this test required, say, twenty photos, I think the results would have been of more practical value for readers. Or am I in the minority here?
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Hawkman said 2:22PM on 11-21-2009
The results would seem applicable, at least as far as personal experience with DoubleTake goes. It's great, until you add a second row -- at which point, you're on your own. (Still possible, just fiddly.)
rowan said 3:25PM on 11-21-2009
If you are working professionally or just need an excellent high-end program (for the Mac) then Stitcher Unlimited 2009 from Autodesk is better than all of these. Supports large files and many different kinds of output (pano, QTVR, mov, many others). This used to be Stitcher by RealVis.
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Lou said 4:11PM on 11-21-2009
I have been using Hugin for some time and although you are correct it is not the most intuitive or most polished UI's it is awesome and Free. If you install auto-pano sift it will automatically put in the control points and it can even handle blended images (ie ones where you put 3 bracketed exposures per frame and then n-number of frames). It is definitely worth getting to know this app since it is super powerful and yes it is Free!
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Mvcoile said 4:27PM on 11-21-2009
PTgui *is* indeed an application that should have been included in this list! Though moderately happy with it, it is fairly powerful. Also Stitcher is one of the classics among Panorama stitchers.
How about an updated write-up?
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John B. said 4:28PM on 11-21-2009
I like Canon's Photostitch software that comes with new cameras. It works fairly well and will even make a 360º QuickTime VR of the images if you wrap all the way around. Probably the biggest limitation with this software is that the panos are linear (you can't go up and down). But hey, it's not bad for free (assuming you bought a Canon camera).
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inio said 4:58PM on 11-21-2009
Hugin has a learning curve, but together with Autopano-SIFT (running under Mono) a little manual cleanup of control points and Enblend can produce really impressive results. It just has a pretty steep learning curve and there aren't any good tutorials.
Everything here was done with Hugin: http://www.me.inio.org/
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hansning said 5:07PM on 11-21-2009
By FAR the best one I've tried is PTgui, which surprisingly is left out.
For the record, I stiched more than 300 images together in PTgui, with very good results. Furthermore, you can manually tweak the control points after the autostitch to make those very good results into Excellent ones.
Let me list a short list of features that I use, that many of the other's don't offer:
-Manual control points. Control points are the points of similarity.
-Export into PSD with Layers AND complete seamless image.
-HDR! I shot 150 frames 3 times, each with different exposures. PTgui handles them accordingly.
-Save stitch instructions. Very useful for going back and correcting, transporting files to export on another computer, etc...
and so much more, like lens correction, auto optomizations, choosing the perspective and horizons, etc... This is also one of the faster programs I've used.
Despite its depth, it can also do the simple stitches very easily. Many of the features I use are under the "advanced" menu, which is hidden by default, and a complete stitch can be made with as little as 3 or 4 steps.
Calico, i believe, is based on the same engine, but very much simplified.
But it really doesn't matter which program you use. I'm sure you can get identical results from any of these programs, so long that you use a panoramic tripod that corrects parralax errors. This MUST be the first step to a technically perfect stitched image.
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daba said 5:05PM on 11-21-2009
Do you have a larger version of the image created Autopano Pro for us to view.
I'd like to get a closer look at the stiching of the images. Maybe a 2mb image or so.
thanks for this review, but i'm most probably staying with PS.
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hkk said 5:31PM on 11-21-2009
Showing the output of Photoshop in comparison to that of AutoPano Pro would have been good.
I think if I am stitching 103 high res images, stepping away from the computer for an hour is not unreasonable.
The processing time for such an extreme case really doesn't matter that much, but the image quality would be much more interesting.
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jmello said 7:25PM on 11-21-2009
I too have had good results with PTGui. I even sprung for the Pro version after using it for a few weeks. The automation is worthwhile, though be prepared to let the computer sit and chug away for a few hours if you go for high-res shots like I do.
The UI is well designed, though could use quite a bit more mac-like polish. It feels like a piece of Windows software, circa 2002. Sometimes it's not completely clear what option should be changed or where to go to do things like fix reference points or edit the layout of the panorama.
Where PTGui really shines, however, is in the number of options it gives users. There are at least ten different ways to project the panorama, as well as HDR and Exposure Blending for bracketed images. This is one of the few pieces of panorama software that handles HDR images right out of the box.
My problem with the software is a performance problem as well. Not nearly as bad as Photoshop, but it still causes problems. On my 2.2Ghz Santa Rosa MacBook with 4GB RAM, doing a panorama of around 300 bracketed photos, shot for an epic HDR panorama, takes around ten minutes to shoot, and up to ten hours to process. PTGui also requires around 40GB of temp space for cache files. If I go out for a day of shooting scenery, I can put together ten or more huge panoramas pretty easily. Combine that with a backlog of photos I've taken and not processed means that all night, every night, my poor computer chugs away to put these shots together.
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John said 7:40PM on 11-21-2009
Could you post higher-res photos of the results? That would be much more helpful than the little thumbnails provided.
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Jeff said 7:45PM on 11-21-2009
I was having poor performance on my iPhone 3GS (purchased 2 days ago) as compared to my 1st generation iPod touch. Latency was about double and download speeds 1/2 that of the touch. Now, tonight, I cannot see my wifi network (Airport Extreme) nor my neighbors (Netgear) while the touch sees them just fine.
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jeffrey nee said 7:52PM on 11-21-2009
PTGui has to be included in here. Pretty big omission. While the interface is less than elegant it's given me the best results of any stitcher I've used.
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Steve D said 8:20PM on 11-21-2009
I have been experimenting with PTgui,I have to say, it seems very fast. The only problem area I had in one test was my Cat was in the shot and ended up with 3 ears. (she moved between rotations)... export to Photoshop is easy, should the need arise.
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matejay said 10:21PM on 11-21-2009
PTGui should have been tested as well. I'm voting for an updated article including this software as well because I've been testing pretty much all of these option a while ago and eventually chose PTGui and never loked back. I'm commonly stitching 10-15 image panos from 21Mpix images and PTGui does the job amazingly well!
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Niels Olof Bouvin said 7:13AM on 11-22-2009
I would like to second the recommendation for AutoPano Pro. I use AutoPano Giga on a regular basis, and it is intended to handle even larger panoramas than the one described in the article. AutoPano is an excellent program with (considering the ludicrous amounts of data involved) high performance and output quality. It is easy to handle, and if its own (very good) auto stitching algorithm is unable to handle certain pictures, it is simple to add control points on your own.
While smaller panoramas can be handled by other programs, I have found that AutoPano performs well with large and small sets. The target audience for the large panos are people using equipment such as the Gigapan Imagers (www.gigapan.org).
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nutela said 2:11PM on 11-22-2009
Bleh, so your mac becomes unusable...what a drag. This would not happen in BeOS then again I doubt BeOS had a pano-stitcher :-/
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Pixel-B said 3:09PM on 11-22-2009
Hmm, 103 10-megapixel images in Photoshop on 103 layers? Let's see, creating a 10MP (3648 x 2736) image in Photoshop uses 28.6 MB, so 103 layers would be 2945 MB or about 3 GB just for the image data. Photoshop recommends 3-5x your file size in memory, so unless you have 9-15 GIGABYTES in you computer it will start doing memory swapping to the hard drive which is MUCH slower than your RAM.
I haven't done a lot of stitching, but have worked with big Photoshop files and can say that once it runs out of RAM and goes to the scratch disk everything slows to a crawl, no matter how fast your Mac (or PC) is.
@nutella - Do you really think throwing all these high-res image would be better in BeOS? It's still a lot of data to work with, and it's mostly up to the stitching app to do the hard work anyway.
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