Is there any image stitching software that is truly easy to use?

I've never stitched images together before, but last week I was presented with a scene that I found to be absolutely astounding. I thought to myself, "this is really special; perhaps one day I would like to make a big print of it - really big, like 5 or 6 feet across......too big for my 16MP sensor to give me great results from a single frame."

So, I zoomed in and took a series of images by panning across the scene. Just handheld - there was no time to set up a tripod - no time for anything extra - the light was rapidly fading.

Now these images, about a half dozen of them, need to be stitched together. But I don't know where to begin. I bought Photoshop several months ago, but pretty much abandoned using it because I can't just quickly and easily figure out how to do things in Photoshop - doing the stuff I want to do there would require, like, actual research and focus and concentration, and, quite frankly, I just don't have it in me to put forth that kind of mental effort. So I know that if I got stitching software, and it had a learning curve, I would just end up never using it, and I don't want that to happen.

So, is there any image-stitching software out there that will stitch these images together for me - and not require me to do anything - anything - other than dragging and dropping? I mean, I am looking for a program in which all I have to do is to drag the photos into it and it will automatically stitch them all together all by itself without me having to do anything else.

Also, I would like the stitching software to be able to work "by itself". By that, I mean that I don't want something that operates within another program, or as an add-on to another program (I think the term I am looking for is "plug-in" ? ) I want something that will work all by itself and not require me to have any other program in order to use it.

Any such thing?

By the way, these are the images I want to stitch, and a pic of the whole scene. I know that for optimal results, I should have shot the frames vertically - but alas, there was no time for that, as that would have required much more careful, precise panning, and like I said earlier there was precious little time to do anything - I am lucky to have been able to rip these shots off freehand before the sunlight disappeared.

Heck, I didn't even have time to set the white balance manually, so I realize that I may have to adjust the white balance in some off the frames so that they match the others (that's no problem for me to do in Photos). I was aware of the potential WB issue, but was literally afraid that if I took the 8 or 10 seconds to adjust WB, that the light would disappear and I would miss out altogether.

Photo from Tom Reichner's gallery.
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Image Composite Editor from Microsoft.

I don't use it much, but I tried it out and it's really easy.

https://www.microsoft.​com …oad/details.asp​x?id=52459

^^ This.

I use Microsoft ICE often for pano's.
Just handheld and 'swing around'.
You can even Drag&Drop the cr2 files into ICE.
When exporting to a JPG ICE defaults to 75% quality.
You might want to raise it to 100%.

ICE is only available for the Microsoft Windows platform, no OSX.

Tom runs a iMac, so that puts MS ICE out of the running.

Tom the real issue is that I just don't think that there is a software out there that will necessarily do the job for you, to the standard that you want without the need for some input from you. That would require you to do some degree of learning to get the best results, and I appreciate that your learning difficulties make that almost impossible for you to do. So far the best and easiest to use set of stitching tools that I have found has been those in LRCC, not sure if you get them in the standalone LR6. It seems to do a very good job, better than the version in PS even, though looking at that series of images I would have thought that the PS merge to panorama would do a decent enough job that you would only need to run the merge, which IIRC should auto crop at the end, so that you at least end up with an image that is rectangular, with no blank bits.

What I would suggest is that you try with PS, since you already have it. You would want to export all of the images from Photos as 8 bit TIFF files, so that you can open them in PS, since PS itself doesn't do RAW files. Start PS and this is the bit I can't remember (I don't have PS active at the moment so can't check) there is an option to open multiple files to the photomerge system to create the panorama. Or you may have to open all of the files, then run photomerge. This will start the merging process, which will run and at the end present you with the finished image. As long as you are happy with the result save the file. If not there are a couple of radio button choices that change the way the merged image is projected, spherical would be my first choice followed by cylindrical, I don't think the others are likely to work, but they are choices you can try. Save the final image still as a TIFF and then import it in to Photos, so that you can then export it as you would any other image that you wanted to export for printing. If PS hasn't made the image rectangular with no blank bits around the edges then I would suggest that you don't crop the edges in PS but do that back in Photos too.

I would suggest that the tools in PS are going to be as easy as anything else, and you at least already have it. Tom if you would like to message me I would be very happy to sort out talking you through it over Skype or possibly facetime, but I would have to borrow my daughters iPhone for that.

Alan

Bearing in mind that I've never used a Mac, so I may be totally wrong, but is it possible to run ICE within some sort of emulation mode

As I also found ICE to be very simple to use, an almost '1-click' solution at times

The pano stitching feature in the latest version of Lightroom does a reasonably competent job - especially for something easy like this.

You're not stitching difficult things like a pano of a room with tile floor, where the grid of the tiles must line up perfectly.

I know you were trying out Lightroom for a little while, I don't know if that was just the trial version.

Use Photoshop's Photomerge feature. Literally, you specify the images you want to stitch and the corrections you would like PS to make in the process and you are done. It works within PS, so it satisfies your requirement in that regard as well.

I can only assume the the panorama feature in LR/ACR uses the same engine, so if you want to access the stitch from those applications/environme​nts, you can do it there as well. Open the sequence of raw files from within PS (the ACR window will appear) - in the filmstrip view of the image thumbnails in ACR, select them all, right-click on one and you can choose to create a panorama from the selected images. This way, you can do your raw conversion and pano stitch all in one go from within the ACR dialog if that's how you would prefer to work.

For an image sequence like the one you posted, this should be pretty easy and straightforward - parallax should not be an issue because the entire scene is far away and lies all in the same plane, more or less. Add files and let the stitch happen. The result will be a layered document in PS - you can flatten and save it as whatever file format you would like for further processing in your workflow.

If you post a link to smallish renderings of your image sequence, I will stitch them in PS to give you an idea of the results. The I start a stitch, I render small versions of the source images and stitch them first to save time and make sure the stitch will work. Once I am happy with the stitch, I feed the application the full-res images.

I usually use PTGui to do my stitching but yesterday I fed PS a bunch of images that were taken looking upward at a tower - the images were taken handheld, from the same position on the ground, but some were zoomed relative to the others, etc. PS did a remarkable job, frankly, at compositing them all together simply by using the AUTO method.

kirk

kirkt wrote in post #18161963
I can only assume the the panorama feature in LR/ACR uses the same engine, so if you want to access the stitch from those applications/environme​nts, you can do it there as well. Open the sequence of raw files from within PS (the ACR window will appear) - in the filmstrip view of the image thumbnails in ACR, select them all, right-click on one and you can choose to create a panorama from the selected images. This way, you can do your raw conversion and pano stitch all in one go from within the ACR dialog if that's how you would prefer to work.

Interestingly, LR's photomerge, when applied to DNG files, generates a new DNG file. I haven't experimented much with raw adjustments on the merged DNG image; I'm used to doing as much correction as possible before the merge.

The benefit of using Photoshop's layered results is that you can mask and unmask in places where the Auto stitch/layer/mask didn't quite get it right. With LR, you have little control.

nathancarter wrote in post #18161975
Interestingly, LR's photomerge, when applied to DNG files, generates a new DNG file. I haven't experimented much with raw adjustments on the merged DNG image; I'm used to doing as much correction as possible before the merge.

The benefit of using Photoshop's layered results is that you can mask and unmask in places where the Auto stitch/layer/mask didn't quite get it right. With LR, you have little control.

Yep. I do not use LR and do not use ACR raw panorama unless there is a compelling need for DNG output. Photoshop at least gives you some control over the result - for stubborn merges you can manually arrange the source images on layers in a single large document and then use the auto-align and auto-blend commands to help PS with the initial arrangement of the source images.

Like I said, I usually use PTGui, but for someone who does not want to take on another piece of software, I would suggest PS.

kirk

Since this is not something you want to do regularly, and so you don't have the need or motivation to get or learn the necessary software, and you may want to get a huge print done, I suggest you farm out the job.

Find a friend or professional (maybe on this forum), send them the original untouched image files (RAWs if you have them) and let them do it.

Hey Tom,

I use Microsoft ICE. It's free. Does the job really well, can be done manually or automated and you can output as an uncompressed TIF to continue working on, etc.

Very best,

I prefer PTGui for these kinds of jobs.

https://www.ptgui.com/

Tom Reichner wrote in post #18161716
So, is there any image-stitching software out there that will stitch these images together for me - and not require me to do anything - anything - other than dragging and dropping? I mean, I am looking for a program in which all I have to do is to drag the photos into it and it will automatically stitch them all together all by itself without me having to do anything else.

Also, I would like the stitching software to be able to work "by itself". By that, I mean that I don't want something that operates within another program, or as an add-on to another program (I think the term I am looking for is "plug-in" ? ) I want something that will work all by itself and not require me to have any other program in order to use it.

Any such thing?

Well, the image stacking in Photoshop is already easy enough IMO, just File -> Scripts -> Load files into stack, Edit -> Auto-Align Layers, Edit -> Auto-Blend Layers and presto, you're done.
If pressing a bunch of buttons is still too hard, you can get AutoPano, which is both super-automated and can do batches, while also offering precision tools in case you run into issues.

I always get 8-bit from ICE, can't seem to save TIFF or PSD in 16 bit. For me it works fine on batch-processed image sets. I haven't tried a windows emulator in ten years, but the one I used back in the day for a particular calculator was called WINE. Also there is the free HUGIN for mac, which, unfortunately, I have never been able to get to work.

My go to stitcher is Microsoft ICE now. It does a great job. I use to use the Photomerge in PS, but I feel ICE does it better.

To do your panos, you don't need a tripod, the computer will figure everything out. Just make sure every image has enough overlap. You can use any lens you want but just know that the longer the lens, the more photos you'll need to take to cover the same area. That's not a big issue unless your computer is lacking. I have a regular HP off the shelf. 14gb of memory, i5 processor. At MOST its taking 15 seconds to do a pretty large image. ICE doesn't do raw, but I just quickly convert all the images I want to stitch in the image processor in bridge. That only takes a few seconds.

There isnt much for you to do other than choosing your images and clicking NEXT, at the end what format you want to save the final merge in, and it gives you options of the different perspectives (dont flame out people im using the word very loosely.)

This view is 180 degrees and 13 images. Ive done as many was 45 images with no problem in ICE.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/GoKR​7w