Help using PTGui to stitch interior photos

wastlinger · Jul 11, 2006

I am trying to use PT Gui to stitch together 5 photos and create a single photo of an interior space.

So far my results have not been good.

I am using the following photos:
http://www.calice.net/PIC1.jpg
http://www.calice.net/PIC2.jpg
http://www.calice.net/PIC3.jpg
http://www.calice.net/PIC4.jpg
http://www.calice.net/PIC5.jpg
taken with a Canon A70 Powershot using a lens adapter and a Wide Angle 0.45 lens.

The end result is the following:
http://www.calice.net/reception.jpg

The end result is not too good.

I have done the following:

Input correct settings for the wide angle lens.
Manually added control points to the most affected areas.
Increased the minimum automatic control points between 2 photos to 100 (from 15).

Beyond that I am not quite sure what else I can do.

Any advice on how to improve results would be much appreciated.

niccig · Jul 11, 2006

I've never used PT Gui before, so I can't help with that. If you can't get it to work, you might try AutoStitch (it's free) here:http://www.photo-freeware.net/autostitch.php

Protean · Jul 11, 2006

the result looks pretty good to me (at least stitching wise)

niccig · Jul 11, 2006

Yeah, they didn't look bad to me either. I noticed though that the fireplace to the far left was missing out of the stitched pic. I suppose that's the problem you're having with it, wastlinger? The stitched photo looks pretty smooth to me, but it's a little small to tell for sure. Of course, if that's the size you'll be posting it at, then that's fine

wastlinger · Jul 12, 2006

There is quite a lot of distortion especially along the lines where the walls meet the ceiling and also along the bookshelves.

While I agree that for the purpose of displaying on the web, it may be OK, I would like to perfect the process as much as possible.

Does resolution affect the quality of the stitching i.e. the higher the resolution, the better the result?

I currently don't use a flash and therefore have to compensate with the aperture and shutter speed settings, which leads to slight blurring on the photo. Would an external flash help?

Does anyone know any resources re PTGUI that might answer some these questions? I haven't found anything despite googling it extensively.

Finally, thanks for your help so far.

Protean · Jul 15, 2006

you can't use a flash on this type of shot becuaes the lighting would be un even from shot to shot, unless it was mounted off camera, was set on manual, so it didn't move, and the exposer didn't change, also make sure your camera is on manual, and don't change teh settings from shot to shot, its better to lighten/darken the whole thing, in post, than to do it from shot to shot, becuase it'll be real hard for it to look like one shot

on reason you may be getting so much distortion is becuase your getting parallax issues, since the subject is rather close (for a pano), and since your not rotating the camera around the rear nodal point of the lens, things will be in relitivly different places as you rotate teh camera. so if your really serious about perfecting this, you'll need to buy a pano tripod head, that will let you rotate the lens around its rear nodal point, not around the film plane