Een regelmatig besproken stukje software in het Foto & Video Workflow-subforum is PTGui. Dit programma richt zich op het stitchen van panoramafoto's op zowel macOS- als Windows-systemen. Met een stapel foto's als invoer kan het programma zelf uitzoeken hoe deze naast elkaar gezet moeten worden. Voor het rekenintensieve deel kan het bovendien via OpenCL de gpu inzetten om sneller klaar te zijn. Het beschikt over verschillende opties, waarbij het met PTGui Pro ook mogelijk wordt om onder andere hdr-foto's te combineren, bewegende objecten te maskeren en het kijkpunt aan te passen. Versie 11.1 is enkele dagen geleden uitgebracht met de volgende aanpassingen:
Version 11.1Version 11.0
- Fixed: Masks could be randomly modified when switching images in the Mask tab.
- Fixed: 'assertion failed' error when optimizing certain projects with one or more 'use control points of' checkboxes deselected.
PTGui 11 is a major update! For an overview of the most important changes see What's new in PTGui 11.
First of all: software piracy has been a ongoing problem for almost the entire 17 years of PTGui's existence. To protect against piracy PTGui 11 will require online activation upon installation. The licensing itself has not been changed, e.g. a personal license may still be installed on up to 3 computers simultaneously for personal use, it's just that we now enforce this limit through activation. We've made it as user friendly as possible: if you buy a new computer PTGui can be deactivated with one click and immediately moved to a different machine. For computers not connected to internet an offline activation method is provided. Activations can be managed online using just the license key. And in case of a hard disk crash, a stolen laptop, etc., you will be able to recover the license and install PTGui on a replacement computer.
- New, dark-themed user interface. Dark / Light window theme can be selected in Options / Preferences.
- Full Retina and per-monitor HiDPI support (for high resolution screens)
- Bracketed sets of images are now handled as a single image
- True 'what you see is what you get' rendering in the Panorama Editor and Detail Viewer, using OpenCL GPU acceleration
- Panorama Settings tab, Numerical Transform, Exposure Fusion settings and Tone Mapping settings have been moved to the Panorama Editor
- Improved EXIF parsing, in many cases PTGui can now detect the lens model used, and determine if it is a fisheye or rectilinear lens.
- Rectilinear and fisheye lenses are characterized by focal length instead of field of view
- Lens shift is now characterized as a percentage of the long/short side dimensions of the image, so the parameters are now independent of rotation and size.
- New 'fisheye projection' parameter, to provide support for all known fisheye projections.
- PTGui includes lens presets for many known fisheye lens models. By knowing the lens projection, the cropping circle is set more accurately and more control points will be found.
- Landscape and portrait images can now be mixed in the same project.
- New Lens Database. The same entry can be used for landscape and portrait images. Entries can be associated with EXIF data, so the lens database entry is applied automatically when loading images from the same camera/lens.
- New Camera Database, to store custom camera sensor sizes. Entries can be associated with EXIF data.
- Viewpoint optimization can be enabled, and images can be excluded / included by right clicking the thumbnails in the Project Assistant.
- Image numbers now start at 1 instead of 0
- New project file format: Over the years the PTGui .pts project file format has extended upon the original script file format used by Panorama Tools. All the new (and future) changes no longer fit well in this format; therefore PTGui 11 switches to a new JSON based file format. This will make it much easier to incorporate new features in the future. Of course PTGui 11 can read project files from previous versions. Also an 'export to PTGui 10' function is included to enable interoperability with previous versions and third party software, although this will not cover the new functionalities and parameters.
- The Panorama Tools optimizer can no longer be used with PTGui; many of the new features such as the new fisheye lens model are incompatible with Panorama Tools.
- The PTGui optimizer now natively supports 'line type' control points.
- Smooth zooming in the Control Points, Crop and Mask tabs. Mac users can use Pinch gestures to zoom
- Mac: Touchpad two-finger rotate gesture can be used to rotate the images in the Mask, Crop and Control Points tabs
- Images can be re-ordered by dragging them in the Source Image tab. Multiple images can be dragged at once.
- Batch Lists files are now supported in the standard version. Previously this was a Pro feature.
- GPU acceleration under Windows for AMD GPUs now runs in 64 bit mode, allowing use of more than 2GB of GPU memory
- BigTIFF support! Gigapixel panoramas can be output as .tif and are no longer limited to the proprietary Photoshop .psb format. The BigTIFF dialect is used automatically when the generated .tif image turns out to be larger than 4GB. Keep in mind that not all TIFF capable applications support BifTIFF files.
- Reduced memory use when handling large panoramas in the GUI. When opening a project in PTGui 10 all images would be loaded in memory (and subsequently swapped to disk). PTGui 11 only keeps reduced size thumbnails in memory, loading full size images when needed.
- When opening a project or adding new images, PTGui first reads any embedded thumbnail from the images. This results in a nearly instant panorama preview.
- The OpenEXR library has been updated to v2.2, improving compatibility with other applications.
- PTGui is now a single process application: multiple projects can be open in a single running PTGui application. The Batch Stitcher runs in the same process. In particular on Mac this is the expected behavior: there's only one icon visible in the Dock. File - Open and File - New will open a new window. Double clicking a .pts file will open a new PTGui window instead of replacing the existing one.
- Improved ability to handle symmetrical panoramas: PTGui 10 could get confused by images taken from the center of a symmetrical room. It would place control points not only on overlapping images, but also between similar looking features on opposite sides of the room. This caused a completely misaligned panorama and confused users. PTGui 11's Align Images function handles this more intelligently and generally gives a perfectly aligned panorama.
- Added option to use simple alpha blending instead of the default Multiband blending algorithm. This is useful for combining non overlapping images such as cube faces where multiband blending causes defects. And when stitching 32 bit HDR source images alpha blending may give better results .
- The PTGui stand alone panorama viewer now uses Lanczos pixel interpolation, resulting in a sharper image (previously it used bilinear interpolation).
- New menu option: Images -> Select -> Blend Plane, to select all images at a certain EV level. This replaces the EV selection button in Create Panorama -> Advanced.
- Panorama output size can be fixed to either a percentage of the optimum size, or to a certain number of megapixels. The output size is recalculated automatically after changing the projection or field of view.
- The scroll bars of the two images in the Mask tab can be linked, just like in the Control Points tab.
- Optimizer now offers 3 choices for viewpoint optimization: Reset / Keep / Optimize. Reset disables optimization and will reset the viewpoint parameters to 0. Previously this had to be done manually after disabling viewpoint optimization.
- Control point generator now supports equirectangular images as well.
- Control point generator works well with 32 bit HDR source images. In PTGui 10 it was often necessary to add control points manually.
- New menu item: Images -> Remove Excluded Images (also in context menu in Source Images tab)
- New menu item: Images -> Exclude/Include [only] Selected Images (also in context menu in Source Images tab)
- Images excluded from the panorama are indicated by a red cross over the thumbnail
- sliders (e.g. Preview Exposure) now 'snap' at the value 0, so they can be easily reset to zero.
- Additional menu and keyboard shortcuts for zooming to 10%, 25% and 50% in the Mask, Crop and Control Points tabs
- Mac: Keyboard shortcut for toggling full screen mode: Ctrl+Cmd+F
- Redesigned memory management, to improve stability and performance
- If multiple temporary folders are configured, PTGui will now attempt to use all folders in a balanced way. This improves performance (similar to RAID 0) when stitching panoramas using 2 or more SSD drives for temporary storage. Previously it would store temporary files on the drive with the most space available.
- Any temporary files created by PTGui are guaranteed to be removed after closing PTGui. Previously temp files would not be removed if PTGui crashed or was forcefully closed.
- Temporary data is now written to disk in a few large files instead of many small ones, improving performance.
- Windows: if a progress window is being shown ('please wait...'), the menu bar is still accessible. A new PTGui window can be opened via File - New Launch New Instance even when PTGui is busy.
- Some Fujifilm cameras (incorrectly) record a focal length of 50mm in the EXIF data when a manual lens is used. PTGui identifies and corrects this.
- EXR output: the compression algorithm and bit depth (32 bit full float or 16 bit half float) are now configurable
- If stitching is canceled, or aborted due to an error, all incomplete output files will be deleted. Previously PTGui would leave unfinished corrupt files, potentially causing other applications to crash if they attempted to load the corrupt file.
- Panorama Editor & Detail Viewer: added keyboard shortcut keys [B] [U] and [S] to switch to the Blended, Unblended and Seams preview, and shortcut [N] to toggle displaying of image numbers
- It's now possible to tell the control point generator to look for control points only in overlapping image pairs (Pro version only). This should give a significant speed improvement when aligning gigapixel panoramas and reduces the chances of faulty control points. The images should be roughly positioned beforehand, using Align to Grid, by applying a template or by loading a PapyWizard XML file. This behavior can be enabled using the 'Images are already roughly positioned' flag in Project Settings - 'Align images' behavior. This flag also appears in the Project Assistant when appropriate, after applying a template, after applying a PapyWizard file or after using Align to Grid. Also a new option 'Generate Control Points for overlapping images' has been added to the Control Points menu.
- The control points table in the Control Points tab has been moved to the right hand side of the window. Control point numbers are shown in the same color as the corresponding markers in the images. The table can be collapsed when it is not needed.
- The contents of the metadata dialog box has been moved to a new Metadata tab in the main window.
- Batch Builder: new layout. The options for combining and removing projects are no longer shown as hyperlinks in the projects list, but have been moved to the right-click context menu.
- Batch Builder: new configuration 'Multiple cameras, one subfolder per camera'. This is intended for creating time lapse panoramas using multi camera rigs. The memory card from each camera should be copied to a separate subfolder. Each subfolder should contain the same number of images, in the same ascending numerical order. The generated project files will take one image from each folder.
- Dedicated support for dual fisheye images from the Samsung Gear 360, Xiaomi Mijia Sphere and YI 360 cameras. These cameras produce a single image containing two circular images side by side. When adding such an image to a PTGui project the image will automatically be loaded twice, with different cropping circles and masks, positioned at -90 and +90 degrees yaw. This behavior can be disabled in Project Settings - Miscellaneous if necessary. This even works in the Batch Builder. Due to manufacturing tolerances there will be small differences between individual cameras of the same type, resulting in different small offsets of the image circles. A template can be created for each individual camera by taking a photo (outside, with no objects close to the camera), adding control points and optimizing. Then do File - Save As Template. This template can be used via File - Apply Template, or in the Batch Builder.
- OpenCL is now initialized in the background. No longer shows the 'Initializing OpenCL...' window upon startup.
- True command line stitching without showing any windows. Launch PTGui with the -stitchnogui flag, followed by one or more project files and/or batch lists. The command does not return until stitching has finished, so this makes it easy to include PTGui as part of a larger batch process.
On macOS launch as follows:"/Applications/PTGui Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/PTGui Pro" -stitchnogui project1.pts project2.pts batchlist.ptgbatch
On Windows:START "" /B "C:\Program Files\PTGui\PTGui.exe" -stitchnogui project1.pts project2.pts batchlist.ptgbatch- New option in Project Settings - Template Behavior controls the way images are linked in the target project when applying a template. Three options:
- Link images in the same way as in the template
- Automatically link images based on exposure (EXIF)
- Don't modify the way images are linked
- This makes it possible (for example) to apply a template of a non-HDR project to an HDR project with bracketed images.
- New option: Project Settings - Miscellaneous - Set the panorama projection to 360 equirectangular when loading wide angle images. This immediately changes the panorama projection when loading a spherical 2:1 image or an image with a field of view of 160 degrees or more. Re-projecting an equirectangular image can now be done just by loading a 2:1 equirectangular image into PTGui and dragging in the Panorama Editor.
- Images can be included/excluded by right-clicking on the thumbnail in the Project Assistant, and in the Panorama Editor in 'edit individual images' mode.
- Batch Stitcher: the ordering of projects can be modified. Projects can be dragged up and down by clicking in the left hand header.
- Align Images will now center the panorama on the first image if all images initially were at yaw = 0 (which is the default for a new project)
- New option: 'Control Point Editor -> Reset CP type to add when switching to different images'. If selected (which is the default), the 'CP type to add' in the Control Points tab will be reset to the default value after switching images. The default value is 'Normal' if two different images are selected, or 'Vertical Line' if the same image is selected in both panels.
- Batch Builder: the 'Batch Stitcher actions - Do Align Images' setting from the template is now also shown in the Batch Builder. This setting is a common source of confusion, so this should make it more clear what the batch stitcher will be doing.
- PTGui 11 continuously recalculates the control point distances in the background (PTGui 10 only did this when running the optimizer).
- When loading a project or adding images, PTGui initially attempts to load the thumbnails embedded in the image file (if available). This gives a nearly instant panorama preview, even for panoramas consisting of hundreds of images.
- The computer is now prevented from going to sleep while stitching, aligning and optimizing projects.
- Convert to cube faces: this now adds the focal length to the EXIF data of the generated images. When loaded back in PTGui, the lens parameters are set to 90 degrees field of view.
- Added sensor size data for many new camera models
- PTGui now offers a straightforward method for assembling cube faces into an equirectangular image. Just start a new project, add the 6 cube face images and go straight to Create Panorama. The file names should match the Cube Face Names set in the Convert to QTVR/Cubic window. PTGui will use these names to figure out which of the 6 images is which cube face.
- Improved 'Delete Worst Control Points'. PTGui 10 was very conservative and would often not remove outlying control points.
- 'Feather' field in Create Panorama now has a numerical entry box as well
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