Digital BW, The Print

Roger,

My experience with Stitcher has been exactly opposite of yours...have you 
used the latest version? It's the only one I have experience with. I started 
out with PTAssembler and, though I believe Max did a first-rate job of 
providing a reasonable GUI front-end for the more complex Panotools lying 
underneath, I never found the stitching process to be very intuitive using 
this tool. Additionally, seams on the final renders required quite a bit of 
work to blend everything together nicely. I never had any problems setting 
appropriate control points, but always seemed to have the point-of-view set 
slightly wrong. And, when "things" (yaw, etc) messed up I was not able to 
fix the image to my satisfaction. Probably some of my issues stemmed from 
lack of knowledge on how to effectively use PTAssembler and Panotools, but I 
finally just gave up.

However, after reading several positive reviews of Stitcher 4.0 and 
contacting a couple of photographers on the 'net that I knew owned the 
software and who's opinions I respected, I ordered it. This was a very 
unusual move for me because I don't usually buy software that I haven't 
taken out for a test drive, first! I had been forewarned that though a demo 
version was available it was so limited that one could not really judge it 
properly. To be honest, I had to contact tech support with a few questions 
about how to set certain final rendering characteristics, but that was it. 
To my mind, this software is pretty intuitive to use. After playing around 
with several renderings of Canon 10D images creating psd layer-based output 
with layer masks, and rendering the same image as a single layer tiff file, 
I decided that the enormous file sizes required for the former were just not 
necessary. I created the layered output because of my experience with 
PTAssembler; figuring I'd have to go back and play with the seams to get 
things right. However, I found that this workflow was not necessary. 
Whatever algorithms Stitcher 4.0 uses for blending seams is, to my eyes, 
totally invisible. Now, I only ever create single layered tiff output.

As the saying goes...different strokes for different folks. Don't get me 
wrong, I think PTAssembler is a great tool; especially for the price! I've 
never used the tools you mention but, for me, Stitcher has worked out great.

Regards,
Alan Huntley

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roger Howard" <rogerhoward@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 2:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] RE:Digital camera 10Dvs4x5




On Dec 10, 2004, at 11:50 AM, Alan.Huntley@... wrote:

>
> Carl,
>
> Great comparisons! Get Realviz Stitcher 4.0 and "painful stitching"
> will be a thing of the past! Not inexpensive software, but, IMO, the
> best out there for doing this type of work.

I've owned Stitcher licenses for several versions, and finally gave up
on it... while it can be convenient for easily stitched subject matter,
I often had frames that couldn't be stitched in Stitcher. After
switching to a PanoTools-based workflow (PTMac on Mac OSX - PTGUI,
PTAssembler, or Hugin on Windows) I will never look back... both for
spherical panos (QuicktimeVR, etc) and for more traditional panos. Too
many crashes and unstitchable scenes, and poor blending, not to mention
the high-cost. The PanoTools workflow seems a bit complex at first, but
it's very very capable, and not nearly as difficult as it may seem -
especially now that there are tools like XPoints to automatically find
your control points, and enblend to do first-class seam blending. It
can be an entirely automated process now, but with far better quality
than Stitcher.

Your mileage may vary, of course!

Cheers,

Roger