RealViz's Stitcher 5 is one of a handful of panoramic stitching applications that will let you combine multiple overlapping digital images to create a QuickTime VR (virtual reality) panorama--an onscreen 360-degree image that you can spin around in, and zoom in and out of, using a mouse. The new version adds a few useful new features, including an automatic stitching mode that can speed up your workflow.
Refining the Panorama Process
Many digital cameras have panoramic shooting modes and come with stitching software with which you can create wide-angle still images. Stitcher can create those too, but it can also create cylindrical, spherical, and cubic QuickTime VRs. A special tripod head such as Bogen's 303 QTVR Plus is useful for creating QTVRs, because it has click stops to help you shoot at the proper overlapping angles, and it holds the camera so that its lens rotates around an axis, preventing parallax.
Creating panoramas is a time-consuming process, so Stitcher 5's new automatic stitching feature is welcome. Just load the images you want to stitch and choose the automatic stitching command; a few minutes later (depending on image size and complexity and the speed of your computer), you'll see an approximation of how the images will go together in the final product. You'll still need to render the panorama in a later step, though.
Another time saver: The application can read the EXIF data recorded by all digital cameras to set the proper lens angle. However, panoramas require many pictures--18 or even more, depending on the camera lens, and the application doesn't tell you how many images you've selected for loading; you must count them manually. After they've been loaded, images with long file names can't be easily identified, because the application cuts off their names, and choosing Properties doesn't show the file name at all.
Unfortunately, as with previous versions of Stitcher, you don't always get a precise view of how adjacent images will combine, so you can spend lots of time trying to line things up when you don't need to, or you may not get it right and not find out until after the project renders. Stitcher 5 has a new live preview window, but it's small and thus sufficient only for showing if you've left out an image.
You can still drag your images into Stitcher's main application window and line them up yourself with your mouse, and the application seems more adept than earlier versions at finding common pixels it can use to stitch them. But I found that it often confirmed a good match between two images even when the images obviously weren't lined up correctly. In that case, you must unstitch, adjust the image position again, and then restitch the two images. That can take several attempts, and you can't always get a good match.
So Stitcher 5's provision for letting you set manual control points--a feature that some other stitching applications have had for years--is easily the second-most important new feature. Just click in two adjacent images to set reference points, and the application will use those points to stitch the images. It works well.
Stitcher 5 will allow you to right-click on an image to open it in an image editor, but it will only open one image at a time, not the entire panorama. It will also import Photoshop files and any masks you've created in that application--a good way to delete unwanted objects.
In the Export Business
With Stitcher, you can export a panorama in one of several still-image formats, edit it in an image editor, and then re-import the file to create your QTVR panorama. Stitcher can now export a Photoshop file with each image in the sequence as a different layer, but it crashed repeatedly when I tried to export from a series of high-resolution (9-megapixel) images. I tried exporting it as a lossless JPEG image without layers, and the file it created was empty. However, I was able to export both a Photoshop file and a JPEG from 5-megapixel source images.
Using 5-megapixel images, my 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 system could usually render a QTVR in about 5 minutes. Stitcher lets you choose from a large number of export codecs and has many settings to choose from, so it takes some trial and error to get the right combination of image quality and acceptable file size.
Stitcher 5 is a powerful stitching application, and despite all the settings, one of the easiest to use of its type. But the price seems pretty high for a one-trick pony of an application. At $580, it costs $30 more than Adobe Photoshop, an application with incredible depth. A professional panorama artist may not blink at the price, but amateur enthusiasts like me will probably find it hard to swallow.
Automatic stitching feature improves this expensive, professional-level stitching application.
List: $580
www.realviz.com
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