Have any of you used Autostitch before?

[Fardringle]

While reorganizing my old photos I came across a set of panorama shots of the "back yard" at my in laws' cabin that I took almost 8 years ago, and I decided to finally stitch them together. I'm lazy and didn't want to do it manually so I did some searching online and came across a free program called Autostitch that does all of the processing automatically.

I haven't tried it on any high resolution photos yet (the shots I used are 1.3 megapixel) but it did what I think is a really good job on these four photos and it took less than a minute to complete the entire process on my fairly old computer. I did the cropping and a bit of white balancing which I did separately in GIMP.

It did "curl" the snowmobile tracks in the foreground that were actually on a straight road, but that's a minor issue compared to the great looking nearly 180 degree skyline.

Original photos:
1 (1280x960 resolution)
2
3
4

Full panorama:
5 (4142x954 cropped)

edit: fixed a broken link

 

[HomeBrewerDude]

nice yard! (nice pan too)

 

[Jawo]

I have been using Hugin with PanoTools and AutopanoSIFT plugins for some awesome panoramics. Its an open source project (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) and has incredible control over every aspect of the stiching process. FuzzyBabyBunny has written an excellent tutorial on how to use Hugin, but I can't seem to find the link at work now....

EDIT: After looking at your pics, the "curl" that you mention is due to how you took the pictures. As you were very close to the tracks, your perspective changed, thus the curl. Great pictures by the way!

 

[Fardringle]

I know where the curl in the tracks came from. I only mentioned it because even though it's unavoidable due to the way I took the pictures, it's the only "flaw" I could see in the results.

I'll take a look at Hugin to see if I like the results better than what Autostitch gives me. It's going to be hard to beat the simplicity of Autostitch, though.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I made a very simplistic tutorial for Hugin:

http://www.fuzzybabybunny.com/tutorials/panorama1.html

 

[pennylane]

I've found Hugin to be pretty easy to use, thanks to fuzzybabybunny's tutorial.

This is the second panorama I've successfully made.

One thing I extra I found useful in Hugin that fuzzybabybunny didn't mention is the "straighten" button in the preview section. Hugin sometimes curves the image, even when, for example, the horizon is straight in the individual picture files. The "straighten" feature really helps to get the horizon (or whatever) straight in the panorama.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Holy crap that one's gorgeous.

Yup, the straighten thing works very well, BUT at times it can create problems with lots and lots of black space at the top or bottom of pictures depending on the picture you're processing. If you're working on a monster stitch, then your final output file can be something like 900MB, with half of that size due to just black space that you need to crop out in PS. A 900MB file is slow to work with. And it may just be me, but I've found Hugin to crash when working on very large pictures. It always gives me an out of memory error even though I have plenty of memory and I have to resort to using command line.

 

[Fardringle]

That's a nice one, fanerman!

To satisfy my curiosity, would you folks that know how to use Hugin properly mind running some source photos through Autostitch as a comparison? Make sure you click Edit>Options and set the size to 100%, and JPEG quality to 99 or 100 before opening the source photos so that you get a good quality output.

I realize that it's probably just because I don't know how to use the program yet, but even following the tutorial for Hugin I haven't been able to get results out of it that are as good as what Autostitch gives me with the dozen or so small collections I've had it stitch together so far. For example, I couldn't get this one to line up in Hugin, but Autostich did the whole thing in less than a minute: Goblin Valley


If your results with Autostitch aren't as good as what you are able to do with Hugin, it might convince me to work a little more at learning how to use it.

 

[spikespiegal]

Autostitch uses an impressive algorithm that's pretty seamless provided you overlap your images. What I don't like about it is the stupid JPG contraints and memory limits.

I'll have to try Hugin because I want more visual controls on what I'm doing.

Again, manual exposure and consistent overlapping are what these programs need for optimum results.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Well, I've spent the day using Autostitch and AutoPano Pro, the commercial "version" of AutoStitch. I must say that the results are very very comparable to Hugin, and this isn't a surprise at all.

I don't think the free Autostitch is as good because it's limited to JPEGs. I've also encountered some small misaligned parts using it. It does however do very well with large stitches with lots of pictures because it's slow, steady, and stable. Hugin with AutoPano-SIFT errors out a lot for me with bugs and out of memory errors.

AutoPano Pro IMO is amazing so far. I think that it is every bit as good as Hugin, and it's not hard to understand why. It uses the same SIFT algorithm as AutoPano-SIFT to detect similarities between images. It uses Smartblend, the same exact blending program that Hugin sometimes uses (Enblend/Smartblend is about the same). I just outputted a massive 1GB TIFF stitch of Bryce Canyon using AutoPano Pro, and it's very very good. No misalignments that I can see. Handles the huge project very very well (Hugin wouldn't have worked - AutoPano-SIFT would have broken, among other things.) The entire thing took about 4 hours to process, and editing it in CS3 maxed out my 4GB of RAM.

Tonight I'm going to run hopefully a ridiculously large stitch of Bryce again using AutoPano Pro. It's about 65 TIFF images and I'm thinking it's going to output a 2GB TIFF file and take the entire night + some. When I wake up it probably still won't be done.

Now I wonder if AS Pro can align a stack of images for HDR purposes... if not, Hugin still has this use.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Ok, if AutoPano Pro can really do everything that it claims to do on it's website, then I think I've found God.

http://www.autopano.net/photo-...ano-pro/new-ideas.html

 

[Fardringle]

Honestly, I didn't see the specs for the Pro version until you posted them. That does look really sweet! For 99? it's a steal for a professional photographer that does a lot of panorama work.

I agree about the annoyance of the JPG limitation on the Autostitch free version, but for now I'm just making them for my own enjoyment so it works out OK. If/when that changes, I'll definitely be looking to buy the pro version!

 

[pennylane]

fuzzybabybunny,

Did you buy Autopano Pro or are you trying out a demo of some kind?

 

[Fardringle]

There is a demo version available from their downloads page here. According to the notes, it's functionally identical to the full pro version except that you can't save projects to continue at a later time, and it puts a watermark in the middle of the output photo.

I haven't paid for the full version but I'm making use of a feature of the Autopano Pro demo that I really like. You can point it to a folder full of photos and it will automatically search through the folder and identify every possible grouping of pictures in the folder. It will even recurse sub-folders so it's possible to point it at one main folder containing every photo in a collection of thousands and it will find every possible panorama in the collection.

I pointed it at my vacation folders and it came up with quite a few nice 2-3 photo combos that I never would have noticed were "stitchable" just by looking at them. Since I don't have the pro version, I'm using Autostitch to blend the photos after Autopano tells me which one to use.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: fanerman91
fuzzybabybunny,

Did you buy Autopano Pro or are you trying out a demo of some kind?

I downloaded the Pro version and, uh, registered it.