Photography - Panorama Tools + PTGUI + Autopano + Enblend

A heads-up for those into making panoramas using PTGUI in
conjunction with Panorama Tools.

The latest v3.7 beta1 of PTGUI now supports the extra Panorama Tools
utilities of Autopano and Enblend as plugins.

I think those of us who use this combo of Panorama Tools (freeware)
with PTGUI (costware) know that the most tedious and time consuming
part is setting enough control points. But considering that most
other panorama stitchers can't handle complex projects as well as
these tools can, we have to put up with this at times if we want it
DONE RIGHT.

Setting control-points is now a thing of the past.

I just tested this on a very difficult set of panels that I use for
torture-testing panorama software. Comprised of 5 portrait oriented
indoor photos of an over-stocked tourists' gift shop with daylight,
fluorescent, and tungsten lighting throughout; done at wide-angle
with a .33x wide-angle converter. No automatic panorama program I've
used yet has been successful at stitching these without some major
human intervention.

I loaded the photos into PTGUI, went to the "Control Points" tab,
then the "Plugins" menu, and selected "Autopano". It found 78
control points automatically in less than 30 seconds. When manually
checking them they were all precise. As good as, or better than, I
could have done by hand.

After selecting the type of panorama I wanted (equirectangular)
allowing PTGUI to optimize for field of view and lens distortion,
then I went to preview. All 5 panels of these highly distorted and
variably lit photos were perfectly aligned.

If you tell PTGUI to save your final panorama in TIF file format,
then the "Enblend" plugin kicks in during final stitching with its
advanced vignetting correction for perfectly seamless blends. What
usually took over an hour of manually fiddling with this
torture-test panorama now only took minutes.

I think I might hear lots of applause and sighs of relief all
throughout the kingdom of Panoland ....

I'm not associated with any of these great authors. I'm just a
desperate end-user that's always looking for a better way.

One other important note: the Autopano and Enblend plugins are like
Panorama Tools--freeware. It doesn't get better than that.

Those of you who can't afford PTGUI have a freeware option out there
now too, "Hugin" from http://hugin.sf.net It's not too different
than PTGUI in function. It's supposed to also work in conjunction
with Autopano and Enblend as plugins. I've not used it yet so I
can't be sure though. Test it out and let us know.