Picture 5
Creating a virtual panorama on a computer is a multi-step process that includes stitching, wrapping the panorama, adding the up & down shots and converting to a appropriate viewing format. For each of these steps a different piece of software is used and since not all of them are available for Mac, it has to be done on a PC (at least partially).
Stitching is done using Helmut Dersch’s Pano Tools (“PanoTools is the most versatile and powerful image manipulation and panoramic image stitching suite there is. All serious panoramic photographers should already have this on their computers...” -Panoguide) Since the program is essentially a java engine that uses script to tell it what to do, it’s recommended to use PTGui as a front-end. The user comes in contact only with the PTGui and the Pano Tools works only in the background.
You will find all the panorama software on Belfast, either in the PANORAMA PROJECT folder or the COLLEGE RELATIONS STUFF folder.
Software sources:
PanoTools from http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/PanoTools.zip
is the engine that builds the panoramas.
PTGui from http://www.ptgui.com/download3.php/ptgui104.exe
is the user-friendly front-end
PTViewer from http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/PTViewer.zip
lets you view the finished panoramas
First download the raw picture files from the camera.
Then open each picture file and rotate it 90 degrees in Photoshop. PTGui will not rotate the images for you.
Run PTGui and go to Tools->Options (Picture 5). Enter the path to PTStitcher which will be under the directory to which you extracted PanoTools and enter the path to the PTViewer. Once this is set up, you won't have to do it again. At this point, you are ready to start putting together your first panorama.
Picture 5
Click on the tab saying Source Images and click the Add button at the bottom and add 8 images that you shot previously. Click on the Lens Settings tab and change the Lens type to Full-frame fisheye. Change the Hor. Field of View to about 97 degrees (this value doesn’t have to be exact as the program adjusts it later automatically). Leave the rest of the values unchanged and click on the Panorama Settings tab. Choose the options as on the Picture 6. You might want to check Use color correction to adjust for the color differences between the images. Anchor image refers to the image that is used as the point of reference in adjusting the rest of the images. About the Interpolator - while Sinc256 (or Sinc1024) gives you the best results, Poly3 is faster and quality is not that much different. (See more on this at http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/interpolator/interpolator.html)
Please build your raw panorama in PSD format with masks, at a relatively high resolution (3600 pixels wide); this makes for easier editing of the panoramic image in Photoshop, and gives us a good-quality original, in the event we decide to distribute the tour on CD. Save this original PSD!
Picture 6
Skip all the way to the Control Points tab, which is the most important and most tedious part of the stitching process. First make sure that Auto add is checked and that Align: both is selected. Then you can start adding control points - points that appear on both of the neighboring images. Start with Image 0 in the left window and Image 1 in the right window. While the program itself suggests that you should add at least 3 control points, I would raise this minimum to 5. In more complex scenes even around 8 control points and more doesn’t hurt. The best places for control points are edges or corners of buildings, tips of tree branches (make sure that they did not move due to wind in between the images), lights, cracks in the sidewalk or small objects such as doorknobs, distant windows, etc. Once a pair of control points is in place, their location cannot be changed, the entire pair has to be deleted by selecting it and clicking on Remove. Placement of the control point can be also done using the keyboard (Alt+cursor keys to move the crosshair and Alt+Enter to place the control point). Number of control point and the precision in placing them are the keys to successful stitching. You go from one pair of images to the following one by clicking Next on the bottom navigation bar.
After you have placed control points on all 8 pairs of images (0&1 through 7&0), click on Optimizer tab. Uncheck Optimize lens Field of View, set the Minimize lens distortion to Medium and select an Anchor image (central image of the panorama, around which the other images will be optimized). Click Run Optimizer and wait for it to optimize the control points distances. The optimal result is an average control point distance of around 1. After you ran optimization without optimization of the lens field of view, run it again with the FOV optimization this time. That should improve your results a bit. If even after this step the results are unsatisfactory (message says bad or not bad) you have to check whether there isn’t a problem with the control points placement or you might want to add some more control points.
The next step is the creation of the panoramic image itself. You click Create Panorama tab and then a button with the same label on that page. Depending on the width and height of the panorama, the number of control points and the interpolator used, the stitching process can take quite some time.
The output of this stitching process is a spherical panoramic image in PSD format. Save off a copy as JPEG with maximum quality, for the next step.
Adding the up and down shots while the panorama is in its original format as generated by PTGui would be very difficult of not impossible. Therefore it is necessary to convert it to a cubic panorama. The conversion is done in MGI PhotoVista 2.0. Run the software, go to File->Open panorama… and load the output JPEG image from the PTGui. When the Adjust Panorama Settings dialog window pops up, choose Sphere with 180 vertical FOV and 360 horizontal FOV. You can preview the panorama by clicking Panorama-> Show viewer. You can notice the missing pieces of the complete panorama -the “holes” at the bottom and top.
Next: convert the panorama to cubic format. Click Panorama-> Convert To… Cube. You will get a vertical strip of 6 images, which are essentially the faces of a cube. Save this image by going to File->Save as…. Open this image up in Photoshop; notice the circular holes at the "top" and "bottom?" You need to fill these holes with your "up" and "down" shots. To achieve this, you should convert the up and down images from fisheye format to a normal one. This can be done by using the Photoshop Pano Tools plug in called Remap and selecting From: horizontal fisheye To: normal. Try a setting of 130h / 100 v for the remap filter.
Use masks in a layered photoshop file to build the top and bottom. Note: Do not sharpen the image while in Cubic mode, this will emphasize the edges of the cubes too much.
Once you are satisfied with the addition of the “up” and “down” shots, save this image both as a PSD and as a jpeg at very high quality again. Load it in into MGI PhotoVista the same way you loaded the PTGui output image a while ago. Use Photovista to convert back from cubic into spherical and save the image once again. The result of this whole operation is a spherical JPEG image.
Now there is one last step. Open the spherical jpeg in Photoshop, and size to 1800 pixels wide. Retouch, color-correct, and sharpen as necessary. Save your resulting PSD.
Please be sure to save a PSD at each step of the process, for our archives. This is necessary if we ever need to go back and edit or resize the panorama for other uses.
Our preferred format for panoramas is QTVR - Apple’s proprietary format that requires QuickTime plug-in to view the panoramas.
PC Method: In order to save into this format, you need to download GoCubic utility. The first step in the conversion is opening the “cubic JPEG” generated by the PhotoVista (see here) and saving each of the sides of the cube separately into an image file. The naming of these files is crucial. While the names can be anything, they should all end with a number from 1 to 6 such as:
1. Front 2. Left 3. Back 4. Right 5. Top (facing front) 6. Bottom (facing front)
Then only open the GoCubic program, make sure that Make Pano -> Cubic is checked and click Make Pano Movie… The program saves the panorama in *.mov format that can be viewed on any computer with the appropriate plug-in.
Macintosh Method: Use Apple MakeCubic on the Macintosh to convert the spherical panorama to a cubic QTVR .mov file. This operation will work on a .psd as well as a .jpeg. Set your panorama compression to a low percentage, like 25%. Most of the other settings don't matter because we will override them on the HTML page.
Call your .mov file in HTML by using this structure:
<embed src="alumni-2400.mov" type="video/quicktime" width="300"
height="265" pan="250" controller="true" fov="55"
tilt="-20" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">
src: The filename
type: video/quicktime
width: the width of the window; should be the same setting from MakeCubic program
height: should be the same as you set in MakeCubic plus 15 pixels if you want to show the controller
controller: choose "true" to display a little control panel at the bottom. add 15 pixels to the height to make room for this.
pan: what left-right point the movie should display when it loads
tilt: what up-down point the movie should display when it loads
fov: how close (magnification) the movie should display when it loads; will depend on factors such as the resolution of your panorama. 50 is a nice one.
Read more details on Apple's site.
