Jan’s Experiments

So I finally tried to implement my own automatic way of stitching panos. Don’t expect some sophisticated system, it’s actually pretty easy. I still have to click my mouse going from one step into another, however the point is that this can be fully automated and it did not require any sophisticated input. A chimp monkey could do it instead of me . I spent about 30 seconds with creating this pano which is far less than the time it took me to put this this blog post online.

Here’s what I did:
- Take the pictures, there are two things that needs to be considered when taking pictures for automatic panos
- 1. Leveling: The horizon needs to be leveled as precise as possible because the automatic software cannot determine the correct leveling for you
- 2. Precission: The pano head parallax point needs to be precisely calibrated, any misaligned is more visible in auto mode
- Load the pictures into a computer
- Adjust chromatic aberation and via a predefined filter plus apply any other filter you wish
- Export them as tiffs
- Load them in PtGui and let them auto-stitch, there is one important point:
- 1. Lens settings in PtGui: I don’t have the numbers, I’m running completely on auto stitch, that’s why I need even better precision when taking panos
- Save the result as jpeg

That’s it. 30 seconds of manual input plus 2 minutes of my quad-core gaming machine time.

And here’s the result:

Tram 7 in Prague

What do you think? I know the quality could be better, I saved it in a very low resolution to improve load time and like I mentioned above, it would help to have a lens profile set correctly in PtGui and/or calibrate the pano head more precisely.