Pixtra PanoStitcher Tutorial: Campus

4) save a high-resolution master panorama for screen saver or printing and derive a lower-resolution version for web publishing;

1) Zoom the lens out to the base focal length of 28mm and set the camera exposure to Manual mode.

2) Pan camera around to decide the Aperture and Shutter Speed settings so that the photos of the whole surrounding will be bright enough but without any over-exposure.

3) Tilt the camera up by 10° to catch the roof tops. Take overlapping photos handheld while turning around. Try to stay on one spot as you turn to minimize the parallax effect. The overlap is around 30%.

Load the photos from the camera's memory to the computer in the directory named "Louvre" (the file names are half-sized to Louvre0x.jpg for demo convenience).

Using PanoGuide, each step of the stitching process is described in the following:

2) Go through the folder hierarchy in the left pane to open the folder "campus". The middle pane shows all the .JPG files in "campus".

4) Click on the "Thumbnail" checkbox to switch the Image Browser from Filename Mode to Thumbnail Mode.

5) While pressing the [Shift] key, click on the first file and then on the last file. All .JPG files in the folder are selected. Click "Load Selections" to load the fourteen selected images to PhotoBench.

6) Arrange the thumbnails by dragging them to their correct locations in PhotoBench.

7) Click on the PhotoBench "Full loop" button, since the last and the first images have overlap.

1) Click on the Stitch Toolbar "Settings..." button to bring up the "Stitch settings" dialog box.

2) It is known that at the focal length (28mm) of the camera used in this example there is substantial distortion towards the periphery of an image, which needs to be corrected for stitching. Click on the "Enable" check box to activate the "Select..." button. Click on the button to pop-up the "Select Camera Info" dialog box. Select the Camera Info file "Olympus C-3000 (28mm).txt" and Click [OK].

4) Uncheck "Auto-balance intensity" (since the camera exposure for the photos was fixed).

1) Click on the Stitch Toolbar "Stitch" button. PanoStitcher will try to go through all im age pairs to make the panorama preview.

2) The stitching stops at image pair 5-6 with the Image Pair Overlap window popping up prompting for manual adjustment.

- Rough align with mouse: Drag right image near the cross anchor to shift it so that the top of Arc de Triomphe is roughly aligned; Drag the anchor on the Arc's top center. Drag a distance away from the anchor to rotate the right image such that the left lamp post is roughly aligned

- Fine-tune with arrow keys: use arrow keys to perfect the Arc's overlay; use [Ctrl]+left/right arrow to rotate so that the left lamp post is one.

3) Inspect the panorama preview. Images look well registered. For exercise purpose here, we assme images 1 & 2 are not well-registered. Click on the link bar between image pair 1 & 2 on PhotoBench to pop-up the menu. Choose "Adjust image pair" to bring up the window "Image Pair for Markers". The marker pair #7 have error circles drawn around, indicating inprecision of their locationing. This is indeed the case as caused by the drifting fountain water stream. Click on marker 7 in the right image to make it the active marker. Use arrow keys to shift it 2 pixels to the right and 2 down.

4) Click "Stitch". Or, right-click in the "Image Pair for Markers" window to pop-up its floating menu and choose "Stitch this pair". A new panorama preview is generated with the matching between image 1 & 2 corrected by their marker pairs. Open the window "Image Pair for Markers" for 1-2: notice that the error circles for Marker pair #7 is gone now.

1) Drag on the "Size" slide-bar to choose Resolution "R: .75" which corresponds to a panorama size of 4328 x 584 pixels.

2) Click Stitch Toolbar "Blend" to make the smoothed panorama (automatically cropped).

3) Make the Panorama window the active window by clicking on it. Then make the panorama window just fit inside PanoStitcher's main window (by clicking the Zoom-in or Zoom-out button on the tool bar while pressing the [Ctrl] key).

4) The ground is not blended as smooth. This is due to Blend option (x) Fixed in Settings window and Blend width small 50 pixels. Larger value will smooth the ground but can introduce ghost from moving crowd. Change Blend option to (x) Elastic in Settings window; Click "Blend" to generate a new panorama, which is smooth with little ghost.

Elastic blending uses dynamic blend width depending on image features in overlap regions. Slowly changing features with large brightness differences are smoothed over a wider blend width, yet detailed features are retained with narrower blend width

5) Right-click in the panorama window to pop-up its floating menu. Choose "Roll Panorama"

(only active for a 360° panorama) and the pointer becomes a hand cursor. Click and drag on the panorama to move it the left a little to put the pyramid in the panorama center. Right click on the panorama to return the cursor to a pointer.

1) Right-click on the panorama to pop-up the panorama floating menu. Choose "Select Region". Click and drag in the panorama window to select the region of interest. Fine-tune by clicking and dragging the region's top/bottom sides. Right-click on the panorama and choose "Crop".

1) Click on File | Save Project to save the stitching project to the project file campus.psp in the "campus" folder. Later you can continue working by loading this .psp file to PanoStitcher clicking Stitch.

2) Click on Main Toolbar "Save image" icon to pop-up the "Save Panorama Image" window. Save the panorama to the name "pano_Louvre360.jpg". This is the master panorama for future use.

Fig. 6a Panorama [25%], with Fixed blending.

Fig. 6b Final panorama [25%], with Elastic blending.

3) Right-click on panorama and select "View in PixtraViewer..." to pan and zoom the saved panorama. You can also view the panorama in Perspective view which will straighten the inherent warping.

4) Click on Main Toolbar Print button to bring up the visual printing utility. Set page Orientation to "Landscape" in the Setup | Page Setup dialog box. Click and drag on a printing grid corner or center to fit the panorama to five 8"x11"pages. Click on the panorama [Print] button to print the panorama.

* The five printed pages will need to be taped or glued, and will have visible seams. A better way is to tape or glue five blank papers together before printing, or to buy panorama photo paper (8"x22"). Then in Print setting, choose the proper "paper size" in "Page Setup" and "Fit One Page". The panorama will be printed to a single long paper. Alternatively you can submit the panorama to the web for online printing.

** When using your camera and photo set for a making your own panorama, you should transfer the settings for your stitching project to PanoStitcher's main menu Edit | Configuration if you expect the current settings to be used frequently in the future.

1) Right-click on panorama and select "Set as Screen Saver" to pop-up "Display Properties". Select the "Screen Saver" tab. If Pixtra PanoScreen is the current screen saver, the "campus.tif" thumbnail preview should already be spinning. Otherwise you need to select PanoScreen from the screen saver drop-down list. Click "Settings..." to pop-up the Pixtra PanoScreen Configuration window. Change the spin-speed or add the panorama to a PanoAlbum. Click OK to finish. I n the Screen Saver menu click OK to set "pano_campus.tif" as the screen saver of choice.
2) To publish the panorama to your website you need to scale down the master panorama. Load "pano_Louvre360.jpg" to PanoStitcher. Click on main menu View | Zoom... | Select image size. Change "Width" to 660 to reduce the panorama to exactly the right size for this web page you are reading. Right-click in the panorama window to select "Save at screen resolution" to save the reduced panorama as seen on the screen (below is the resultant image).
You can also select "Place in web page" to automatically generate a dynamic web page using the Pixtra PanoViewer plug-in.

3) Adjust initial view box so that the pyramid is in its center (as is in the Layout diagram)

7) Click Publish: specify tour page file name. A Flash tour will be created (optionally you can choose Framed Java for Java tour)

9) Upload tour to your web server, following the instruction in the starter page

1. Camera Info file: If the photos have distortion, it is strongly recommended to use the corresponding Camera Info file to correct the distortion. Otherwise the images will not be properly stitched. You can experiment this by disabling Camera Info and stitch.

2. There are two methods to manually stitch an image pair. Marker method and Overlay method. Overlay is available only when focal length is known, which is true here from the Camera Info file. So when auto-stitch failed for image pair 5-6, Overlay was selected as the primary method with its intuitive handy nature. Notice that you can "Switch to Marker method" in the floating menu via right-clicking in Overlay window.