| Greg's overview of panorama software |
| Greg's photography pages |
| Greg's photo albums |
| Greg's photos |
| Greg's photo index |
|
|
|
|
This page is severely out of date, but I don't have time to update it right now.
I've been taking weekly photos of my garden since September 2007, and since October 2008 I've been including some panorama shots. That involves a fair amount of processing, and I've tried a number of alternatives:
Hugin is a free panorama stitcher. I have many objections to it, and one day I'll write them up, but so far it seems the best choice.
My cameras, an Olympus E-510 and later an E-30, have a builtin panorama facility, which for some marketing reason is tied to using the obsolescent xD memory cards that Olympus insists on using. I bought an xD card in February 2009, and before it died on me a few weeks later, I tried out the panorama facility. Summary: useless.
On a forum I heard about a commercial product called Panorama Maker 5 Pro (there's no non-Pro version). He already uses hugin, and there's a free trial version, so I gave it a try. My results were initially encouraging, but further attempts suggest that it's far too easily pleased. Certainly not even as good as hugin, and the GUI is even more annoying than hugin.
On 3 September 2009 I received a demo version of Autopano Pro 2.0. It's supposed to run under Linux, but it doesn't tell you how to run the program (it's called /usr/bin/AutopanoPro). Running it was less than successful:
=== grog@cvr2 (/dev/pts/3) ~ 1 -> AutopanoPro
As I found out from their support:
The error you have is caused by the fact that you don't have openGL on your linux. The v2 of autopano needs an opengl 2.0 graphic card with proprietary drivers installed.
It would have been nice had the executable checked for the presence of OpenGL, rather than just dying horribly. Not a good advertisement for the product. I installed it on Microsoft instead and got one of the strangest panoramas I have ever seen:
|
|
||||||||
That was due to its “autorecognition” function, which is clearly inadequate. So is the documentation: I had Autopano Pro 2.0, but all the instructions are for version 1.4. With some playing around, I managed to get better results:
The slight incontinuities in the image are my fault, not Autopanos: I had the camera mounted incorrectly. But the results are barely different from Hugin produced:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
| Greg's home page | Greg's diary | Greg's photos | Copyright |
