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

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WOW! So many thoughtful and insightful replies - thank you all! I will have to take some time to read each post carefully, and glean all I can rom the treasure trove of info that you have a ll shared with me.

I will say that the Microsoft I.C.E. thing seems perfect......except that I use an iMac, and don't have a windows-based computer anymore. But perhaps I could use one of my friends' computers. As long as using I.C.E. with big RAW or TIFF files doesn't require much processing power, then that should be a viable option. Unfortunately, I don't know anybody with a powerful windows-based computer (nobody I know does photo editing or anything like that).

I will look into the Photo Merge thing with Photoshop to see if it could be a workable thing for me. But, I should have mentioned that I only have Photoshop Elements (a recent version). Hopefully, Elements has this feature???

I will be responding more to individual posts one at a time, when I have a chance to do so. That'll take some real brain power, and right now my brain is a bit pooped out and can't maintain focus on an idea for more than a few seconds - the result of a long, hard day in the office.

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For Mac there is software(cross-platform -- Linux, Windows, Mac OS X). http://hugin.sourcefor​ge.net/
Drag and drop only -- not so sure. You may need to do more than drag and drop. Could be worth a bit of time to decide for yourself.

BigAl007 wrote in post #18161826
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.

Thanks for the thoughtful and helpful response, Alan - it is very appreciated.

I should have made it more clear in my initial post - the Photoshop program that I have is Elements - one of the most recent versions, if not the most recent version (forget the actual number now). Do you happen to know offhand if the newer Elements have the PhotoMerge capability that you speak of?

It seems that every time I try to do something in Photoshop, I spend an inordinate amount of time clicking on things, in order to find what I am looking for. And I never seem to find it. And, what's worse, the "clicking around" process is not enjoyable for me - I do not enjoy "just messing around" in Photoshop. In fact, I loathe it! So it is important to me to know exactly where to go (within the program) and what to click on before I even get started. I do search YouTube for tutorials that specifically address whatever I am trying to do at the time, but these tutorials are very difficult to make use of. Why? Because they are, say, 20 or 30 or 40 minutes long, and cover so much more than just the thing I want to know about. What am I supposed to do - watch 40 minutes of stuff I don't need just to finally find that one minute of instruction that gives me what I want? That is ridiculously inefficient! So that is why I am so hesitant to use Photoshop? - because of so much wasted time in the past.

Hence, I really appreciate your offer to help me via Skype. That way, we could get right to the one or two commands that I need to use and I wouldn't waste so many minutes looking thru all kinds of stuff that I don't need. I should mention, however, that I have tried to use Skype in the past, an could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get it to work on my computer. I spent over a half hour on the Skype website, trying to download it or upload it or whatever it is that you do, and trying to set up an account. Never could get it figured out even though I spent all of those minutes trying to do so. Frustrating!

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jabtas wrote in post #18161844
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

Hmmm. Sounds interesting. But keep in mind that I am extremely computer and technology illiterate. I can't even get Skype to work, and I can't figure out how to get email and Facebook to work on my smartphone. So for me to use an "emulation code" (whatever that is) - I doubt that I would ever be able to figure out how to do such a thing.

jabtas wrote in post #18161844
As I also found ICE to be very simple to use, an almost '1-click' solution at times

That is exactly what I am looking for. It seems like it should be such a possible thing for software designers to do - all the code has to contain is the instructions to recognize "adjacent pixels" - right?

I would think that as long is code is written to do that, for every single pixel, that then it would be extremely easy to use, and would produce absolutely perfect results.

But it would have to be written properly, would it not? I mean, if the code writers take shortcuts and try to incorporate some kind of interpolation, then it would suck, and could provide less-than-perfect results at times. But if there are actually lines of code written for each and every pixel in the entire image, then how could it possible not line everything up absolutely perfectly?

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Tom I did a "search" for "Photoshop Elements Panorama" and got numerous links -- this is one that looked helpful (or do the search for others):

https://helpx.adobe.co​m …g-together-panoramas.html

nathancarter wrote in post #18161943
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.

Thanks, Nathan!

I do indeed have Lightroom, but I don't know if I ever installed it on my new computer. It may be here, but I sometimes have trouble finding where the different programs are. When my friend comes over later next week, I will have him look on my mac to see if I have Lightroom on it somewhere. He always seems to be able to find stuff on my mac that I can't find myself!

I haven't worked with Lightroom in, like, forever. When I used to try to use it, it would take, like, many seconds just for the program to open - like half a minute or more. Then when I would try to bring an image into LR, it seemed to want to bring in more than just that one image, like it wanted to import ALL of my photos or something. Which was extremely frustrating. Hopefully the problems were due to my older computer, and now that I have a new iMac maybe LR will work as it is supposed to (if I have it on here).

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Tom Reichner wrote in post #18163885
Thanks, Nathan!

I do indeed have Lightroom, but I don't know if I ever installed it on my new computer. It may be here, but I sometimes have trouble finding where the different programs are. When my friend comes over later next week, I will have him look on my mac to see if I have Lightroom on it somewhere. He always seems to be able to find stuff on my mac that I can't find myself!

I haven't worked with Lightroom in, like, forever. When I used to try to use it, it would take, like, many seconds just for the program to open - like half a minute or more. Then when I would try to bring an image into LR, it seemed to want to bring in more than just that one image, like it wanted to import ALL of my photos or something. Which was extremely frustrating. Hopefully the problems were due to my older computer, and now that I have a new iMac maybe LR will work as it is supposed to (if I have it on here).

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If you're not regularly using Lightroom, it's definitely not worth it to install it for JUST this feature.

If Lightroom is part of your normal workflow - as it is mine - then the built-in pano stitching is worth a shot.

I couldn't remember if you had kept using it or not.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #18163881
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That is exactly what I am looking for. It seems like it should be such a possible thing for software designers to do - all the code has to contain is the instructions to recognize "adjacent pixels" - right?

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In case anyone happens to be curious about this, it is one of those software issues that is 'fairly easy, but with a ton of incredibly hard edge cases'.

Edge cases that you need to deal with include things like lens aberrations (and variations on them from specific copy of the lens design to the next), and dealing with all the different ways the lens can distort the image from edge to edge.

Dealing with images over time. Getting detection and alignment of images when you're taking photos of something held at 90 degrees to the camera on a stand, and each photo is perfectly offset by a given amount while using a known lens... That's an easy thing. But taking a few dozen photos spread over maybe as much as a minute, where things are moving and lighting is possibly even changing a bit? That's a lot of stuff to deal with with tons of room for things to go wrong.

Even just detecting and properly ordering photos is not the easiest problem to solve in the world. It is similar to a puzzle piece edge detection in a way, a relatively easy problem, with with a pile more gotchas to deal with.

Just settling on a pixel grid alignment is kind of an awkward problem with a somewhat imperfect solution. Photo A might be titled a little more than Photo B, and the pixels where they overlap aren't perfectly aligned to whole pixels...

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Wow - so much detailed info that you all shared on this topic. It may take me weeks to read and 'digest' what you have all shared, but I will keep plugging away at it, one post at a time, until I address all of the responses.

kirkt wrote in post #18161963
Use Photoshop's Photomerge feature . . . . It works within PS, so it satisfies your requirement in that regard as well.

Actually, my "requirement" was that I not have to use PhotoShop, as in, so many things are available as "plug ins" that work within PhotoShop, and my experiences with PhotoShop have been so unpleasant that I wanted to avoid using it at all costs. But based on what you say below, maybe I should be reconsidering that.

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.

What you write here confuses me. In fact, the entire concept of "ACR" confuses me.

Someone here on POTN once tried to explain to me what ACR is, and what it does, and how it works along with PhotoShop, but I literally gave myself a headache reading about it. I went back to the explanations time and time again, every day reading another paragraph - well, many days I had to read the same paragraph that I had read the day before, because I still didn't understand it. This went on for weeks, and even after all of that time and all of that effort, I was still unable to develop an understanding of what ACR is and what it does.

If I have to use multiple programs to accomplish my task, and I have to get those programs to in some way "talk to" one another, this probably isn't going to happen.

kirkt wrote in post #18161963
. . . . . 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.

I don't understand the "layered" and "flattening" concept. That is another thing that frustrates me about PhotoShop - when I used to try to use it, a lot of times I would try to do something, and it would give me an error message saying something about layers. Like, "you cannot use that command because the document is not a layered file", or "you need to create another layer". I forget the exact verbiage of the error messages, but the point they were making is that I couldn't do whatever it was that I wanted to do unless I somehow created another layer......yet there were no obvious, right-there-in-front-of-me prompts for creating this extra layer.

If something requires an additional layer, then wouldn't you think that PhotoShop would have a prompt that would automatically pop up and ask you, "would you like PS to create another layer for you?" And then you select "yes" or "no" or "cancel" or whatever. Instead, they tell you it won't work without another layer, but then leave you to die and rot, because they don't explain how to create that other layer. It's like they assume that you already know things, which is bull____.

Ok, I've got to calm down.....just talking - just thinking - about PhotoShop gets my blood pressure up to the boiling point. Sorry 'bout the rant.

kirkt wrote in post #18161963
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.

That is very kind and helpful of you, Kirk!

I wouldn't mind posting a link to even the full files. But to do that I will have to figure out how to use DropBox. I tried to use DropBox before, but couldn't figure out how to get it to work. Perhaps I will have to invest some more time in learning how to set up and use DropBox, so that I can share files with others.

kirkt wrote in post #18161963
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.

Wow, Kirk - that is awesome! You make it sound so easy! This is encouraging news. If it really does work that simply, by just clicking on a thing that says "AUTO", then I think I may need to reconsider my aversion to PhotoShop, and see if perhaps it might actually be something that I could figure out.

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Post forum-sized images (2 per post) here and I will stitch them in PS - I will try to record a screencast so you can see what to do in PS. I understand you use elements, and I have not used that but for informational purposes it may be helpful to you.

kirk

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Wow - thank you, Kirk!

I think that the screencast you mention could be extremely helpful; I tend to learn things easily and quickly when someone shows me how to do something, as opposed to someone telling me how to do it (such as via the written word).

Images 1 and 2, respectively, going from left to right:

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Images 3 and 4, respectively, going from left to right:

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Images 5 and 6, respectively, going from left to right. That's it! Six images in total.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #18166586
What you write here confuses me. In fact, the entire concept of "ACR" confuses me.

ACR is Adobe Camera Raw, the set of Adobe-developed code that interprets the RAW file and does raw-level adjustments. This same low-level code is used behind the scenes in both Lightroom and Photoshop.

How about a car analogy, I like those:
It's like the Ford Duratec V6 engine. You can get the same 3.7L V6 engine in the Mustang or in the F-150 pickup. It turns gasoline into rotational horsepower and torque - just like the ACR engine turns RAW data into a usable image format. However, the engine doesn't do much by itself, it needs the rest of the car, just like ACR isn't really a standalone thing.

The Mustang is a lot different than the F-150 - different body, different dash, different interior and controls. Similarly, Photoshop is different than Lightroom - different interface and different finishing tools. But the way they read and interpret the RAW data is the same, just like that 3.7L V6 engine under the hood is approximately the same.

You can get a Chevy Camaro with a V6 too. It'll still turn gasoline into horsepower. But the way that it accomplishes the task is different under the hood, and a different exterior too. That's DPP or iPhoto - they still turn RAW data into a finished jpeg, but with a different interface and different underlying code.

You can get a panel-van with a heavy-duty diesel V8 - maybe that's Capture One. Not many frills, but what it does, it does extremely well.

Any of these vehicles will get you to the grocery store, and any of these software packages will interpret a raw file and produce a finished jpeg.

... I think I'm running to the end of this analogy

Tom, were those results you got above gotten from following the directions here? If so, good for you!

If you can do a 2-shot pano, then a 6-shot pano will be similar, but you'll be working with/blending 6 shots, a bit more complicated. However, to start with, you could take the 2-shot panos and then blend them!

One thing that's not clear, did you open those originals as RAW files? If so, then you were using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to open them prior to opening them to blend in the PS editor.

Although you can blend other image formats (such as jpegs or tiffs), it can be very valuable to start with the Raw files in ACR. This way you can do things like tweak your White Balance, Exposure/Contrast and input sharpening before dong the stitching.

Well, keep us posted!