PTGui update

Parasol pines panoramic landscape

A new version of PTGui was published during my Corsica trip. I've downloaded it yesterday and did some tests with old images.
I was interested by two points of the evolutions : better memory management and better blending quality. For some years, i think that PTGui's blender makes a wonderful work in most of the cases so it's difficult to say from my test images if the new version is a real improvement. I'll need to try with some more problematic pics.
While i was doing these tests, my main workstation was busy with processing Corsica shots so i tried the new version on an old HP Vectra with PIII and 384 MB RAM. I can say that developpers have done a great work with memeory management and speed because the software was running very fast with this old config :)

Just back from holidays

From August 24 to September 5 i left the south of Provence to the Alps with my wife and daughter for a little holidays.
As usual, we traveled with our van so we can stop where and when we want.
After a few days in the north of Provence, we stopped in this wonderful place in the south of french Alps.

Green fields, blue sky, wonderful mountains and rivers. It was a nice place for photography, for playing and for hiking so we stayed there about 10 days.

As i was not there for work and didn't want to carry some heavy equipment i just took my D100 with one brand new zoom : Tarmon 17-50 XR DiII and one light and small tripod.
About the Tamron, i've to say that it's amazing : not expensive, light, small and very sharp. I think it's a perfect only lens for holidays. The focal range permits some nice landscapes and family candids and i was nicely surprised by the raw files sharpness.

Something else about this lens :
I shoot some panoramic landscapes with just one tripod and nothing to set up the nodal point. When stitching in PTGui Pro some files shooted with the shortest focal the optimizer's diagnostic was always very good. It seems that the nodal point is not so far in front of the lens. Nice !

PTGui Pro : first impressions

For now more than one month i stitch all my panoramic photos with PTGui Pro.
The software is still in beta state and versions are updated very often so i won't write here a real full review but just give my firsts impressions.

About normal (not HDR) images :

• The control points generator seems to be more accurate.
• Blending is very good in most of the cases but sometimes using smartblend as a plugin can improve the result.
• Speed and memory management are very nice. I could stitch some huge panos on an old HP Vectra with Pentium III and 384 MB of RAM.
• I've noticed a little bug with Vertical lines control points but it's not a real issue and i think it will be corrected in a future update.

The HDR side :

As told in a previous post, i'm not a HDR fan. But HDR management beeing one of the biggest improvement of PTGui Pro, i've tested it with some landscapes in difficult light conditions.
So here is what i can say :

• PTGui makes a very good work to identify and align the different exposures of the same shot.
• I've noticed some kinds of dark halos in some parts of the resulting HDR files. This problem does'nt show when i combine the same source files in Photomatix Pro. In the PTGui versions history i read they fixed this bug but i didn't verify.
• The Tone Mapping tool is too basic in my mind and the preview is too small. I find very hard to obtain results having a natural look.

Conclusion :

For me PTGui Pro was the natural update for PTGui to compete with AutoPano Pro and every panoramic photographer will enjoy its simple interface and the quality of the resulting files. For me there is no doubt that the HDR functions will be improved in the future updates.

PTGui Pro : PTGui's answer to AutoPano Pro

PTGui started its life a few years ago as a GUI (Graphic User Interface) for Panorama Tools.
In the first versions i used, i had to set all control points by hand, and file processing was a little slow.
While taking age, PTGui was realy improved : files processing was greatly increased and the software offers now a few tools for an automatic detection of control points. The last stable version (6.03) is one of the most powerful tools for stiching panoramic images.

Near one year ago, a french developper launched Autopano Pro who's is in my mind the only real competitor of PTGui. AutoPano is easy to use and produces some images of high quality with a big plus for some photographers : it handles HDR.

I'm not an HDR fan but sometimes it can be useful to combine different exposures to avoid highlights clipping and noisy shadows so i was surprised that PTGui didn't seem to do anything in the HDR way.
It's done now, i discovered this morning on the PTGui website that PTGui Pro will be soon released and will support HDR.

If you like panoramic photos, you can check mines on patmo.net.

A few words about panoramic photography

I always loved panoramic landscapes, with digital photography, stitching images has become very popular and stitching softwares very powerful.
I own 2 QTVR panoramic heads, one pro and one cheap.
The cheap one presents for me 2 issues. First it's long to setup in the field and second it's not rigid enough to ensure a very good image sharpness with some lenses.
The pro one is better but i don't always have it in my bag ...
So most of time i just use my tripod with its standard rotule head and a bubble level.

After the shooting session, digital workflow is still the same :

• The RAW files are converted in 48 bits TIF with SilkyPix.
• The TIF files are stitched with PTGUI.
• Final adjustments are done with PictureWindow Pro.

With the earliest versions of PTGui, we had to manually set up the control points. With the recent versions this time is gone and PTGui offers two different ways to automaticaly find these points. Its blending capabilities has also evoluated with the versions and you can now obtain rapidly some stuning results if you take a little care while shooting.