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.