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Provides: Creates flat, cylindrical, cubical, spherical and QTVR panoramas from multiple images
Developer: RealViz
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3, 533MHz G4, 512MB RAM
Retail Price: New: $580, Upgrade: $230 (Students can purchase the previous version (4) for $130)
This is the second time I've had a chance to work with Stitcher (read my review of Stitcher 4) and a good program is even better. Keep in mind though that many of the "great new things" are automations of what Stitcher was already doing before. Thus, much of what Stitcher was doing, it is still doing, only now it's easier to do. Are you still with me? As a side note, when I started this review, I was working with version 5.0.x. Just before I finished the review, 5.1 came out and I had to revise some of my comments...for the better.
Besides the new automation, there have also been a few cosmetic changes: the toolbar has been removed, and most of the operations have been moved to icons sitting on the main Stitcher window (menu access still remains). As seen below, the window is still dark grey, and not only are the controls on the upper left side of the main window, but also the images to be stitched can now be displayed on the bottom of the window. You can vary the size of the thumbnails by the slider (seen underneath the thumbnails), and if you click on the ovals on each side of the thumbnails, you scroll to the next set (like clicking in the grey area in a scroll bar). Or, if you click on the arrow head, you will scroll one image at a time.
You can vary the size of the thumbnails by sliding the slider (seen above, below the thumbnails) left and right. By the way, if you want to remove the thumbnails from the working area, drag the slider all the way to the left. This is one of several undocumented features in Stitcher 5. If you have set the size of the thumbnails to be small, you can have the thumbnails grow as you mouse over them just like the icons in the Macintosh OS X Dock. (I find that feature as annoying in Stitcher as I do in the Mac OS, so I have that turned off in the preferences.)
The Image Strip, as used in earlier versions of Stitcher, is still available, but since the images can be placed in the main work area, I can now avoid using the Image Strip. My continuing issue with the Image Strip is that the images do not re-wrap as you change the size or shape of the Image Strip. As such, I found it annoying to work with, but now I can just avoid it all together.
One other aspect that hasn't changed is that there is the not-so obvious grow box in the lower right corner of the work-area window. If you mouse-down on the lower right corner and drag, you can change the height and/or width of the work window, it's just that there is no visual indication that such a handle is even available. It's there, even if there is no visual cue.
When you mouse-over each of the work icons, the various options for that stage of the process pop up to the right. The basic concept is that you move top to bottom, left to right, and do the appropriate steps as needed.
The top set of steps is for either opening a pre-existing Stitcher document, loading images, saving a project or starting a new project. The second series of steps is for constructing the panorama, and contains probably the biggest new feature: Automatic Stitching. In the past, you would drag each image into the working area from the Image Strip, align each image as best as you could, and then select Stitch Image from the Contextual menu or from the Tool Bar.
Now, after you drag in all of your images (all at once) or open the images up from within the program, you select the first icon in the second row (Automatic Stitch), and get a cup of coffee, or lunch, depending on how fast your computer is. One of the prices for the automation built into Stitcher is the speed of the whole program. I have two computers: a G4, 1.25 dual with 1.75GB of RAM and a G5, 2.5 dual with 2GB of RAM. On the older machine, it took 15 minutes 29 seconds to stitch 72 images together (see below for why I'm stitching 72 photos together). On my G5 it took 5 minutes 55 seconds. When doing this by hand (as one would do with Stitcher 4) it took 31 minutes 7 seconds. (Keep in mind that the manual stitching was done on the G5, so, if I was doing this on the G4, it would have taken longer.)
The message here is that the automatic stitching works very well, and the faster your computer, the faster the whole process goes. That's not to say you need the fastest computer around to work with Stitcher, but it does help. Suffice it to say that if you are working with a G4, expect Stitcher to lumber to some degree. It will work, but it will not be snappy. Also, I found that on my G4, the pop-up icons in the work area tended to respond slowly. In general, while Stitcher worked on the G4, I found it best to go into a bit of a "Zen" mode and not be impatient.
As mentioned in my previous review on Stitcher 4, you can make panoramas in Photoshop, and most cameras come with software that also allows you to join images together for a panorama. The difference between what these programs and Stitcher are doing is that Stitcher "bends" the images to work with the focal length of the camera's lens so that you can not only stitch images that are side-by-side, but also on top and below. Photoshop CS2 does provide a "perspective mode," but it is not fully and truly "bending" the image. Stitcher takes the image and warps it as if you were taking images inside a sphere because, in effect, that is what you are doing. And, since this is no longer plainer geometry, the other programs cannot do this as well as Stitcher.
To properly use Stitcher, or to obtain better panoramas regardless of software used, you must have a tripod. No matter how good you think you can hold a camera at the same height and no matter how well you think you can rotate your body around the camera the same way, trust me; you can't. If you are taking photos of far-far away scenery, you probably can get away with just a tripod. However, if you want to get any panoramas or QTVRs of things close to you, you not only must have a tripod, but you also must get some sort of "entrance pupil" support (also erroneously known as the "nodal point") for your camera.
There are a number of entrance pupil supports for cameras ranging from less than $100 to over a thousand dollars. I have a Nodal Ninja that I'm very happy with. The basic concept of an entrance pupil support is that inside the lens there is a point that parallax doesn't exist. Parallax is what you see when you place your finger at arms length, close one eye and site along your finger at an object at a distance. Then, without moving your finger, close the open eye and open the closed eye. What was in line is now not in line; your finger didn't move, but the location of your looking-eye did. So, if you can rotate your camera around this entrance pupil point (which is NOT where the tripod screw is located under your camera), there will not be any distortion as you rotate your camera.
To properly obtain a sufficient number of photos to make a QTVR movie of a room, you need to take photos about every 15 degrees, or 24 photos for each layer of images (this varies depending on the focal length of your camera lens, but is a good generic figure to use). So, for three pans of a room (looking down a bit, looking straight ahead, and looking up a bit) there are a total of 72 photos that need to be stitched together. (To obtain a full sphere of a room, you must continue to take images up and down until you finish pointing straight up and straight down, but that is not the purpose of this review.)
One of the requirements of Stitcher 5 that hasn't changed is that there should be no less than 15 degrees of overlap for each image for Stitcher to have enough data in the image for Stitcher to calculate how to properly piece the images together. Interestingly, but not really surprising, is that the more "stuff" on an image, the easier it is for Stitcher to automatically piece the photos together. That is, if you have a cluttered room with lots of objects, there is more than enough information for Stitcher to work with to link the two images. But if you have two photos of the sky with no clouds, Stitcher has nothing to work with and you will probably have to "Force Stitch" the two images together. Force Stitching is when Stitcher doesn't have enough information to perform the calculations for how an image fits and matches the image(s) next to it and you have to tell Stitcher in effect "trust me, the image goes here." [Hint: If you are stitching a featureless region like a sky, do not continue sequentially if you enter a region with no features. Rather, find pieces of sky with other stuff in them such as branches and clouds that overlap previously laid sections. Once there is nothing left but blue, distribute them as you can. The reason for this is that you are better off to lock in images that have features and then use the featureless images to fill in. If you place the featureless images and force-stitch them in, you might find that when you get to the images with features, they may not match and/or align at all well.]
Because it works so well, I do recommend that you use the Automatic Stitch. However, if there are regions of limited or featureless images, Stitcher will simply not even try to use these images, and you are required to finish the final stitching yourself. Alternatively, you simply may chose to stitch the images for whatever reason. The following are some guidelines for manual stitching.
As seen below, each time you bring an image into the work area, the active image is bordered with "red," and an un-stitched image has a "red" corner. After an image is properly stitched, it receives a "green" corner. If the image was "forced stitched," it receives an "orange" corner. Masking is also possible with Stitcher, and these are shown with a left facing triangle in the colored corner. Another option is the Yellow corner, and that designates "Manually Stitched" images. To preform these, you select both a previously stitched piece and a non-stitched piece, and from a Contextual menu, select Manual Stitch. This brings up a dual window view of the two images. When you mouse-down on one item in one image, a magnified view of that section pops up, and you place a numbered marker at that point. Then, in the other image, you place a common marker on the same object, but in the other view. After you have at least three of these common markers, you click the "Stitch" button, and supposedly this will do a better job than clicking on the Force Stitching option. Despite several attempts, I was never able to get this to work correctly.
The Masking is done to hide or force show objects in images that would otherwise cause problems. The classic example is if someone walks past your scene. Two different photos have the person in two different locations. Using masking lets you select which of the two you wish to use (or neither), so there are no ghost walkers in your final photo.
Controlling your image in the main work area also has not changed; you can zoom in and out by either selecting "Zoom" from the "View" menu and dragging up to zoom-in and down to zoom-out or by placing your finger on the Command key and dragging up or down. Similarly, to pan to the left or right, you can either select Pan from the "View" menu and mouse-down and drag to the left or right or place your finger on the Option key and mouse-down and drag left or right.
Another important key combination is "Shift-Control, click and drag (up and/or down)." This is used for rotating an image when you need to fine-tune its alignment when hand-placing an image. This is most important when you are taking images that have deep perspective such as floors or ceilings. Below, you see an image of a ceiling with a second image (outlined in red) that obviously has a different perspective.
The way you deal with this is by selecting one point around which you can easily rotate, and dragging the new image until your choice spot is overlaid over the original image. In the image below, you can see that I've selected the corner of the fluorescent light fixture.
At this point, you move your mouse to the area around which you want to rotate, then mouse-down while holding the Shift and Control keys. Then, you drag out to the right which allows you to rotate the image around the point where you first started. Once you have the other regions of the image aligned, you can let go.
At this point you can Control-click (or right-click) to bring up the Contextual menu and select "Semi-Automatic Stitch." Now, Stitcher will crank away for a few seconds while it calculates focal length, luminosity, and attachment points. In Stitcher 4, this command was simply "Stitch." With Stitcher 5's Automatic Stitch ability, this option is now considered Semi-automatic because it only stitches the two images.
Once all the calculations are done, the new image will swoop into the center of the work area, ready for you to bring in the next image.
Once you have the entire collection of images stitched, the next step is to properly align the whole magilla so that it is even with the horizon. If you stitched the image by hand, it's not too difficult to find your image to be twisted and distorted, as seen below. Also below, I'm displaying another new feature to Stitcher 5, and that's the Preview view. This is the small display seen in the upper right corner of the work window that shows what (and how much) you have assembled. It also shows how far off your image is from alignment by any snaking of the image (as seen below).
At this point, you can either manually align the image or select the third icon down: "Automatic Align Panoramas." Like Automatic Stitch, it works. If you wish to do the alignment by hand, you can select the Align icon or select Align from the Tools menu.
When doing a manual Align, you look for objects that you know should be vertical or horizontal, such as the door frame seen below. You simply drag a line along the edge at various points of the panorama, and, as you add more and more (you need a minimum of two), you obtain greater accuracy.
As I stated before, you need either vertical or horizontal "truths" to set the alignment. If you select the Automatic Align or do it manually, the image is then set. One thing that can happen is for the image to flip on its side because the program wasn't sure if what you provided was a horizontal or vertical line. This is not that big a deal, and is easily corrected.
Once you have your alignment set, your image in the Preview should appear straight, not wavy like a snake.
The last bit of setup before you save your QTVR is to Equalize the images. As you look at the image above (not the thumbnails), you can see all of the tiles that make up each part (photo) of the image. I did do a color correction on the images in Photoshop (the color correction was done by using Levels, saving the setting and applying the same setting to every image). The basic problem with taking images indoors is that you have both florescent lights and outdoor lights competing with each other. This means you can never achieve full color coordination without a great amount of work either in preparation or in post-production. What I did was sort of a best-fit scenario that seems to do an acceptable job. Either way, when clicking on the Equalize button, Stitcher 5 does a general averaging of luminosity across all of the images so that most of these aberrations are significantly muted.
The next step is critical if you want the bottom or top of your QTVR to show up. If you look at the image above, you can see that the image completely fills up the working area, both top and bottom. If you were to create a QTVR from this document at this point, you'd see no higher or lower than what you see in the above image. What you need to do is zoom out until you can see as low (or high) as you want to see. If you look in the image below, you can see that I've zoomed out until I can start to see the very bottom of the captured image. You can stop zooming out at that point. In the image below, I've tended to aim my camera more down than up. If you are taking images of trees and the sky, your situation would obviously be reversed. [Again, back to the concept of taking photos within a sphere; if you are taking most of your photos with the angle of the images below the center horizon, you cannot move the ring of images higher because they were taken on the lower half of the horizon. That is why, in the image below, there is more black above the images than below; the focus of the images were taken below the horizon.]
Finally, you are at the point where you can render your final product. If there's any place where Stitcher becomes frustrating, here it is. The reason is that there is much from which to select, and Realviz doesn't necessarily explain some of the options all that well. That, and there are some unique "user interface" issues that are no different than in Stitcher 4, and are still bad.
The process should begin with setting the title of your QTVR, and it appears that (if you look at the image below) all you need to do is type into the field just the right of where it says "Filename," but you can't. What you do need to do is click on the "Browse" button, which brings up a standard "Save" dialog box offering you the ability to decide where you want the item saved and to provide a name. What is needed here is not a Browse button, but an Export button (and remove the word "Filename" altogether). The reason for Export is because if you save a document in a format that cannot be viewed by the parent program, you "Export the document." If the new document can be read by the parent program, than you'd use either use "Save" or "Save As..."
As seen below, when creating a QTVR movie, there are seven tabs (the other non-QTVR options have fewer tabs), each with its own myriad selection options. While some of the selection options are obvious, others can be figured out, and some are just down-right mysterious. There is a "Tell me more" section on the bottom of the Render window that is supposed to provide hints, explanations and guidelines, but I found it to be mostly inadequate.
For what I've set up, I'm going to be creating a Cylindrical QTVR. This is one of eight different formats that can be created with Stitcher 5 as seen below on the left. If not a QTVR, there are nine different document types into which you can save the document. If you select the Photoshop format, each image is saved as a separate layer. This is very cool. The manual does provide a cursory explanation about what these formats are for and the differences therein. Realistically, a book could be written about these options. But that notwithstanding, the information in the manual could have been expanded upon.
When creating a Cylindrical QTVR, the full potential height is limited by the number of pixels used to create the height, and the width is based on how many pixels there are at that maximum height. This is not the size at how large the QTVR is rendered, only the number of pixels in the render. The more pixels, the larger the image (in kilobyte size) and the greater amount the user will be able to zoom in and still achieve good clarity. For placing images on the web, I've found that about 1500-2000 pixels in height seems to give me the best results. (Just above this setting is a checkbox for "Use defined Viewport." Sadly, the explanation of what this is for in the manual makes no sense. When I checked this selection and then clicked the "Preview" button on the bottom, the resulting image looks as if there was no attempt to align the image, as it looked very cattywonker. I left it unchecked.
One of the worst UI aspects in Stitcher can be found in the Render tab. When you select this tab, you have the option to "Define Render Area." At this point, a new window pops up letting you marquee a yellow rectangle of what part of the image will be used. This is very useful if you are creating a general panorama, but does not seem to assist in making a QTVR. There are two dreadful issues with this window. First off, there's no way to close it by clicking. the only way I found to close the window is to press the Enter (or Return) key from the keyboard. Second, there's an ultra secret trick to remove the yellow area (the main image below is set at 50% to fit in this review). To the left of the main image is a 100% image of the upper left corner (the right corner is just the same and is a mirror image). If you look at the left corner image, you can see a small black triangle in that corner. If you click on that black triangle, you can make the defined yellow area disappear. This is an Applelinks exclusive, I've not seen this information anywhere else.
Another confusing region in the settings is the one under the "Movie Settings." In this tab, you'll find how to set the size of the resulting QTVR movie. Sadly, they do not have a collection of default sizes such as 320x280 or 160x140 or any size in between. This would be such an easy drop-down menu addition, it's surprising they do not have it available.
It's the next section that is somewhat of a challenge, setting the Pan, Tilt, and FOV (Field of View). Each of these is fairly straightforward to figure out what it is for, but setting the settings is the challenge and setting these is very important if you want your final QTVR to appear the way you want it to appear. Here's another Applelinks exclusive: how I was able to get this tab to work:
When you get to this section, go ahead and click the QTVR Preview button. This will take a few minutes to render, but once it's done it will work instantaneously after that as long as you do not close the Render window. Once the QTVR Preview is rendered, there are two button options: "Cancel" and "Apply." This window will work just like a regular QTVR movie, and you should scroll up to see if you can see a lot of black (no image) on the top of the image. If you can, the Tilt is set too high. Click the Apply button and decrease the Max-Tilt number (the max is 90 degrees). Start with something too small like 30 degrees and click the QTVR Preview button again. See if you can't move the window as high as you'd like. If you can't, click on the Apply button and increase the Tilt-Max setting to something like 50 degrees. Click on the QTVR Preview button again and see if you can see too much black. Click on the Apply button again and reset the Tilt-Max number. Continue this until you have set the Tilt-Max to the proper amount. Now, repeat the whole process until you have the Tilt-Min setting at an amount that satisfies your expectations.
Lastly, move the image around until you are looking at what you'd like your viewers to see when they open your QTVR the first time. For example, you might want them to first see a painting or some particularly nice furniture as opposed to a blank wall or a door. Once you've found the proper view and magnification (zooming in and/or out), click on the Apply button the last time. This sets your Pan and FOV.
As far as I'm concerned, the settings for this tab are among the most important for creating a QTVR to display the way you want it to. But either the user interface is dreadful, it is not properly explained, or I have yet to figure out how to do it properly. It's a pity, because the visual cues available in setting the Render Area could apply here, but, sadly, they do not provide the results one might expect. Hopefully for Stitcher 6, this whole section will be completely redone.
Anyhow, once you are done with all of the settings, click on the Render button and sit back. Depending on the number of pixels involved in your image, the speed of your processor and the amount of RAM in your system, you will be done in a few minutes or more. A sample QTVR movie can be seen here, [You must have QuickTime installed to see and interact with a QTVR movie. QuickTime can be downloaded for free.]
There are a few new features with 5.1 that are definitely worth commenting on. First off, there is now a Movie mode where you can take any panorama in Stitcher and create a movie with "Key Burn's Effect" running throughout. That is, you can zoom in or out, pan left or right, zoom in and out some more, etc. You can move and zoom for as long as you want your movie to be; there is no time limit (beyond the patience of your audience). For complete information on this, check the new PDF manual that comes with the 5.1 release. The information from the Help menu on this is shockingly dreadful, the PDF is very helpful.
If you tend to create a great number of stitcher documents that all need to be rendered, there is now a batch rendering option, as seen below. I'm of mixed view on this as I find that when the computer is very tied up for a period of time, it's time for me to stretch, get a bite to eat or, in other words, take a forced break before getting back to work. However, if you have 20-30 images to render, this feature means the stitching can be done when you go home for the night.
New with v5.1 is the enhanced ability to detect the center of a lens to create better alignment between two images and what Realviz calls "Enblend" which does a better job of overcoming parallax and misalignment issues.
Previous to the new release of Stitcher 5.1, Realviz provided surprisingly limited support for Stitcher. That is, the number of tips, suggestions and guidelines on their website were somewhat limited. However, concurrent with the release of Stitcher 5.1, Realviz has created a new site exclusively for Stitcher, and contained within are a number of tutorials, tips, and a variety of help. Unfortunately, several of the new site's features haven't been built yet, only providing messages that "this page is currently under construction..." At least there is hope. Meanwhile, there are a few tutorials, tips and guidelines. What's there gives one hope and shows promise.
Unfortunately, the site is done completely in Flash. While Flash is great for some things, I find it distracting and that the various effects get in the way of the information. In addition, Flash sites do not allow for opening pages in different tabs or windows, preventing the full power of tabbed viewing of websites.
While I was working on this review, I had a problem and used their online form to ask a question. Despite their promise that they would get back to me within 24 hours (during the workweek), I never got a response. There is also a forum that has been around since 2001. As I looked at the various questions, a disappointing number of them showed no responses from anyone (although at least one of the ones I looked at showed that the person did receive a personal response to his query).
Early on in my work with Stitcher, I did forward a question to my contact at Realviz and received some excellent answers—but not everyone has a contact at Realviz, so this doesn't really count. I don't want to say "you are on your own" if you purchase Stitcher, but I can say that you might not have access to quick answers unless you are willing to purchase a support contract.
In short, Stitcher 5 does an absolutely spectacular job of creating panoramas, QTVR and any of the other document types created. There is no doubt that the changes in version 5 will help anyone who is creating panoramas because of the full power of the automatic stitching. In addition, the cosmetic changes are welcome, but I wish they had kept the Tool Bar because I find the pop-up tools function performs rather slowly on a slow processor. The Ken Burn's movie effect is very good (even if it came late with version 5.1). Also with the 5.1 release is the Batch processing and better merging of images. These are good additions because, beyond them, much of version 5 is the automation of what was in version 4. Thus, if you haven't owned Stitcher before, this is an absolutely great version to get. If you already own version 4, you have to ask yourself if you create enough of these to justify the $230 upgrade cost, and couple that with the speed of your processor times the extra time of your day spent stitching together images. For some, that might mean you are already on the way to your software store. For others, you may not create enough panoramas or QTVR movies to justify the cost. I would love to give Stitcher 5 a full 5 rating, but it loses a mark because of the limited assistance, coupled with the high initial cost, compounded by the fact that some may find the (excellent) automation features a "convenience," not a "can't live without." As is, this is about as high a 4 rating as I've ever given.
Applelinks Rating
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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