stitching software: what do you use?

[ofdphoto]

Hi everyone,

I know there are some threads on this already, but the ones I could find were a bit old and not very detailed.

So I'm just having a go at some panoramas and am thus on the hunt for some affordable high-quality stitching software. So far I've found REALVIZ Stitcher (pricy) and Panorama Factory.

What do you use? Why? And how does it go sharpness-wise?

Thanks in advance :-)

[R Hardman]

Autostitch - Is free and I think it works great. Only limit is it has to use jpg images.

[ofdphoto]

Thanks for that R Hardman :-)

I checked out AutoStitch ... for the panorama I was working on, it gave me ghosting and I couldn't fix it. I'll definitely keep it for stitching shots that aren't in a row though ... the possibilities look great!

I tried Stitcher and was unimpressed with slowness and memory problems (it ran out of memory on a machine with 2GB RAM when I was just after a preview!) ... not to mention the price. So I tried The Panorama Factory and though it also gave me ghosting, I was able to 'Fine Tune' to get rid of it, so I'm now a happy camper.

But if anyone has any other recommendations feel free to throw them in here please :-)

[rammy]

If there are "things that move" in your shots, such as people or vehicles, then you will get ghosting most of the time. If you mean ghosting at the edges where they do not line up then this is probably a parallax issue and may need to use a pano-head or learn about nodal points and try and do it manually. It may also be that the control points need adjusting in the join, Pan Factory helps with this.

Some software can usually "fix" ghosting on the edges by allowing you to redefine the control points used to make the join and then control this further by defining the banding or the blend points.

I've tried Autostitch but had problems with it, did a post at POTN about it and found a way round it but for me, it has become a "preview" tool. Panorama Tools or PTGui seems to be recommended a lot.

I now use tools to get a "quick" join and review the output. If I am happy with my composition then I go manual and do the best one by hand in Photoshop, gives you infinite control but is time consuming. I control sharpness (retain it) by doing it manually.

[tzphotos.com]

I use PTAssembler and have been for many years. It supports an automatic mode which does a very good job, but still allows you to adjust the image before final rendering.
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