blog added 06/11/2006
PTGui 6.0.3 Workflow
click on above image to interactive 360 degree full screen panorama (more at the bottom)
During the summer PTGui v6 was released for both MS Windows and Apple Mac OS X systems. Keen to try panorama software a bought the licenses to try it out. Below is an illustrated workflow for my current camera setup.Workflow
I found the process to be amazingly easy:1. Launch PTGui
2. Load the nine photographs from my Canon 5D with Canon 15mm f/2.8 FE (set to manual focus, manual exposure - f/5 at 1/160 sec, ISO 100 and locked white balance)
3. Set the lens setting, the Canon EXIF data just says 15mm, so it needs to be set to fullframe FE
4. Press align images, after a short while this is completed, interestingly it set my lens as being equal to a 16.04 mm Fisheye
5. Check the resulting panorama editor to confirm the alignment
6. Work on optimizing the lens parameters, firstly I delete control points with large values.
7. Then press on optimize to improve lens parameters, I repeat these two steps several times until the control point values have come down nicely.
8. Press on advanced button/optimize to select horizontal and vertical shift parameters, to tweak final control point values.
9. Create Panorama by 1) setting output size, 2) .tiff format, 3) method - I use Stitch = PTGui and Blend = Enblend plug-in 4) press Create button.
10. The resulting .tif file was then checked briefly in Adobe Photoshop, turned into a QTVR file using CubicConvertor and web page created using Pleinpot.
I photographed 4 panoramas this afternoon and quickly generated the resulting QTVR files, they can be seen by clicking on the four images below.
