January 2010 Basic III Class

Testing various stitching software- ICE by Microsoft, PanaVue Image Assembler, and AutoStitch.

On January 10, while out cross country skiing, I took seven overlapping shots, left to right, and below is a typical image reduced to a smaller size.

Camera was hand held , and I overlapped by a good margin. Camera: FujiFinePixF200 EXR. I'm not sure if had the camera set to P mode or to EXR mode and the exif data shows "landscape mode, focusing sharply for distance". ISO was 100 throughout. Focal length 6.4mm even though it was on auto focusing and the f stop remained at f9.0 even though I don't think had locked it in. The shutter speed varied from 1/300th second facing towards the sun to a low of 1/160th second when the lens turned north, directly into a bluff area. The original jpgs were 4000x3000 pixels in size. I reduced these in size to 1000 pixels using EasyThumnails and specified 100% quality. I'm glad that I reduced the size considering what happened with the ICE software test.

So for this test I used seven jpg images, 1000 pixels in width.

Autostitch compiled the seven images and produced this in FOUR seconds flat. It does not crop the image. And it is jpg output only.

Ice stitch worked well, but it took just under FIVE minutes to produce this. I tested this three times. On six images it took approximately four minutes.

The snow is a bit whiter on this image compared to the AutoStitch image. Look at tree trunks at the right. Slightly sharper than the first pano. Another sharpness

view is that spruce tree straight ahead.

This is the panorama of the seven images as produced by PanoVue Image Assembler. I have the pro version. It automatically crops the image. This took approximately 5 seconds of stitching time but I

had to spend approximately three minutes setting the control stitch tabs. I tried AUTO but that produced a weird output because a tripod was not

used. You can set the manual stitch flags from 1 to 6 tabs. I chose 1, and this worked well. The advantage of this software

is the saving feature as seen in the screen shot below. This image is also sharper than the first image as PanoVue does a good job of that.

Summary: ICE worked well but is certainly slow. The computer here is a 64 bit, XP pro, 4gb ram and tons of HD space. Custom built with high speed

graphic card.

NOTE: In this last image, and I've never seen this before, or never paid attention to it, the two spruce trees to the right of the one straight ahead have

been removed. Any ideas anyone? Or perhaps because I over lapped by a good margin, PanVue takes only what it thinks it needs?

Later test with PanVue Pro. I decided to use the original seven 4000x3000 pixel sized images. It compiled those in approximately ten seconds and created

an image 9832x2451 pixels in size. I ran that through elements and even though the histogram was very good overall I selected AUTO in the LEVELS

and it made the snow just a tad whiter. And the two spruce trees are there.

January 11, 2010. Overcast type of day.

Comprised of ten vertical shot images taken with a Nikon Coolpix 950 set to landscape mode. No enchancements made. This is the panorama as produced

by AutoStitch

Same images except put together using PanaVue. No enchancements on either of these two and this last one looks better. The spruce trees in foreground also

are closer.

This is at the north end of the golf course. Seven horizontal images taken with the small Fuji camera. A full 160 degrees here. Color of snow should be white and

certainly shooting into the sun caused some issues. PanaVue used to produce this. No enchancements made. This image looks better to me when

converted to black and white.

The following panorama of the South Saskatchewan River is comprised of ten vertical images (2448x3264 pixels) taken with a Canon SX100 IS, set to aperture control f8.0; ISO200

focal length 6mm equivalent to 90mm on a full frame camera; shutter speed varied from 1/1250th second facing southerly into the sun, to 1/640 second when

lens was point to the north. This is a 170 degree view of the South Saskatchewan River, with the downtown core shown in the background.

Date of images, January 18, 2010. Temperature 0 degrees C.