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Provides: Combines multiple images into a variety of formats: from simple panorama all the way to QTVRs
Developer: Autodesk
Format: DVD
Minimum Requirements: 1GHz Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.10 or greater or Mac OS X v10.5.2, 200MB free hard drive space (for installation),
ethernet adapter, qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL 1.2 professional graphics card with latest graphics driver available on vendor's site, two-button mouse with mouse driver software, DVD-ROM drive
Processor Compatibility: Intel only
Availability: Out now
Retail Price:$350; upgrade
from v. 5.7, $90; upgrade from 5.6 and earlier unlimited versions,
$175
Stitcher has long been known as one of the leading panorama stitching applications on the market. For the vast majority of its existence, it was run by a company called Realviz. Then, about a year ago, with little fanfare, Realviz was purchased by Autodesk (the company known for AutoCAD and many other image related applications). Stitcher v5.7 was released soon after that. But now the latest release has a new icon, has dropped PowerPC support, and provides some disappointing HDR support. On the other hand, there is improved Preview interaction (albeit somewhat broken) and has added Sunex Fisheye lens support. One of the best things about this new version of Stitcher is that the price has finally been placed at a point where more people might be willing to try it. Stitcher is a great program, but this is a disappointing update.
[To get a better background on Stitcher itself and/or panorama photography in general, please look at my review of Stitcher 5.6.
I
don't mean to start off so negative for a great program, but Autodesk
itself has identified only three new features with this release.
The first is complete support for the Sunex Fisheye lenses. With
a 185° view,
it only requires 2-3 shots to take a complete 360° panorama. What's
not to like? To give a comparison to put that into perspective, if
you have a 10mm lens, you need to take about 16 shots (two rows of
8 shots) to obtain a full 360° panorama. If you are taking HDR photos,
multiply each photograph by 3 extra shots, or 9 total versus 48 shots.
Normally, I like to test claims made by products, but unfortunately
I am unable to test this because I do not own a fisheye lens. Stitcher
came out with fisheye lens support some iterations ago, so I can only assume
this simply is adding an additional fish-eye lens support to what
they can already achieve.
What could have been a great new feature in this release is " Authoring Controls." Specifically, Authoring Controls improves how one sets a scene, a view, or a QTVR will be presented from any Rendering. It's not really new, as I will get into in a moment, and it doesn't work as well as it should.
The features within Authoring Controls has existed with Stitcher for years. In the past, when you Rendered an image, let's say into a QTVR, getting the scene set so that when you opened the file the image would open exactly where you wanted it to—at the magnification you wanted, along with the proper tilt and pan—was unnecessarily tricky. That is, when you thought you had set everything correctly, which took time, you'd still have to render it, which took a lot more time, to see if you got what you thought you wanted. And if you didn't, you'd start setting the view from scratch and hope for the best.
Now, by selecting the Authoring Controls [Tools (menu)-> Authoring Controls], the screen around your view darkens, not unlike setting a crop in Photoshop (where you can semi-see through the dark region outside of the crop region). You can see the parameters of your scene in the upper right corner palette, but if you click on the Edit button on that palette, a new floating window pops up that displays all of the parameters of that scene. Now, as you zoom in or out, maneuver left and right or up and down, or set the Window's width and/or height, you are done. When you render your image, you will get exactly what you thought you'd get.
[Click on the image above for a full sized image.]
In previous versions of Stitcher, the functions in Authoring Control were found after initiating the Render process, as seen below in this screenshot of Stitcher 5.6.
The controls shown above were a bit of a challenge to use because you could only guess as to what was going to happen in your image. However, by clicking on the QTVR Preview button, a new window would pop up, as shown below. Here, as you moved around your image and/or set field settings on the left, what you saw was what you got.
So, the question of what you gain by moving Authoring Controls to the Tools menu is rather curious. If anything, placing it there perhaps adds discoverability and that would be a good thing. Discoverability is always a challenge to many software vendors because users often request features that have been in the application for years. However, if anything was gained by moving this feature, it also lost at least one level of important control. To explain this loss, I have to explain my personal QTVR creation workflow:
Due to the size of my camera and lens, I cannot point my camera straight up in my Nodal Ninja, and I settle on pointing my first row up at +30° and the 2nd row down at -30°. This means I have a small "hole" at the top and bottom of each image package I need to deal with later.
I load all of the images into Stitcher and let it create the fully stitched image. When viewed in the "Cube" view, you can see the hole at the top and the bottom. I then save the six images out as a cube (top, bottom, left, right, front, and back) from Stitcher in TIF format.
Now, I open the top and bottom images in Photoshop and, using standard Rubber Stamp techniques (along with a bit of flair and panache), I fill in the holes and save the images. Then, back in Stitcher, I open the six images via "Load the Panorama," and go back to "Render," but this time I export as a Cubic QTVR to obtain my QTVR image.
But there's a catch, I now no longer have access to Authoring Controls. For whatever reason, once I have loaded a Panorama in the above technique, Authoring Controls is grayed out in the Tools menu, meaning I cannot set focus, orientation, widow size, or anything that I can still do if I'm using Stitcher 5.6 via the QT Movie settings that have been removed in Stitcher 2009. Fortunately, if you are not processing the images as I'm doing, Authoring Controls will still work as advertised.
There's also one other issue with Authoring Controls; when I open the controls, the image's settings that I see are not necessarily what the controls are showing. For example, if I have the controls set from the last operation to (say) 800 x 400 pixels, the image dimensions I see in the window will not be that size. If I want the new image to have the same 800 x 400 pixel dimension, what I need to do is alter the width or height field; for example, change the height to 350 pixels, and then reset the height back to 400 pixels. For this window to display an image that is not what the controls are stating is just plain wrong. If the data in the fields is going to be ignored, than the data in those fields should snap back to some default values so what the user is seeing is matching with what the data in the fields is saying. An additional necessary feature (but doesn't exist, yet) is that there should be some mechanism to save specific attributes (such as image size) for later use. The user should not have to re-enter the dimensions over and over.
Without a doubt, for me the most disappointing feature is Stitcher's new HDR (High Dynamic Range) dynamics. I do a lot of HDR photography, so I was looking forward to some (any) new dynamic in Stitcher that moved the program forward from what it had.
In earlier versions of Stitcher, you could load and stitch .hdr images. .Hdr is known as the "Radiance" format and are 32-bit images that have been created in (for example) Photoshop or Photomatix. More specifically, these are the products when you take three or more images of the same image (but different shutter speeds) and process them into one image. [Consider the three images as proto-hdr images, or images that will be turned into an hdr image.] The HDR software takes the under-, over-, and proper-exposed images and combines them into one image containing the full dynamic range captured by all three images. These images contain the full dynamic range that can be seen with the eye but typically look dreadful on computer screens and printers because they can only deal with (up to) 16-bit images.
Creating a good-looking 16- or 8-bit image can be done by Photoshop, but can be done much better by programs such as Photomatix. To process these images, they need to undergo a process called "tonemapping." Tonemapping is where the image is converted to a 16- or 8-bit image by selectively making dark regions lighter and light regions darker (thereby compressing the dynamic range) but also by maintaining both global and local contrasts to adjust to best replicate what the eye sees. In other words, if I am given an extremely large shirt, I would need to resize it for wearing. cutting off the bottom parts of the shirt that extend past my knees is not going to make this shirt fit better. Rather, one needs to redo the entire shirt around the shoulders, waste, arms, and across the back.
Although one could load .hdr images in earlier versions of Stitcher, the potential output was limited to only Cylindrical Image, Cubical Image, Spherical Image, and Snapshot Image. If you want a QTVR, what you need to do is to either process and tonemappe the image prior to bringing them into Stitcher (which means you are processing the images as normal images) or process the hdr images in Stitcher, export to the Cubical Image and save the results as hdr images, then process the HDR images in Photoshop or Photomatix, and then load the Cubic panorama and then process to create the QTVR movie.
Whew.
What Stitcher 2009 purported was that it could load the proto-hdr images and process them directly. Well, it can...sort of.
First off, you cannot use raw or DNG images. The images must be either JPEG or TIFF images before loading them into Stitcher 2009. Since I only shoot raw, this meant that I had to convert the images prior to loading the images into Stitcher. Once loaded, the process was fairly straightforward from the new HDR menu. Once the images are loaded, then you can group them into sets depending on how many different shutter speed shots used per image. If you use 3 different shutter speeds per shot, then you group them into 3 images per set.
At this point, you can then raise or lower the overall darkness/lightness of the images on a global basis as shown below from the HDR menu (the options are grayed out in this image because I am showing the stacking process and had not gone far enough in the process for the lightening or darkening feature to be available). This technique is known as the Tone Compression approach to tonemapping, as it works with only the global dynamics of an image, and ignores any local contrasts. This may work for some image sets, but not all. Sadly, it is an extremely limited Tone Compression approach and provides essentially no ability to fine-tune the overall image. If you wish to use the more detailed Image Compression technique, you can't because such an options doesn't exist. All you can do is to globally lighten or darken the image, which is one step above cutting the bottom of the shirt off.
However, at this point you are no further advanced than with previous versions of Stitcher; you are still limited to the four formats for saving the image.
If you really care about creating a high quality QTVR-HDR image, you are far better off processing the images in Photomatix, using Photoshop to enhance the images, then bringing finished TIFF images into Stitcher for subsequent processing. My guess is that Autodesk is trying to make you less dependant upon other software to create complete images. While nobel in intent, the problem with this approach is that the tools provided do not match up to the ability and potential of dedicated software. As much as I extol Photomatix for its superb ability to create HDR images and tonemappe these images into 16- and 8-bit images, Photomatix's ability to enhance those images after the initial processing pales in comparison to Photoshop. For that matter, Photoshop's ability to tonemappe hdr images is pathetic when compared to Photomatix.
In short, this is a very disappointing release of an otherwise excellent program. The only good thing about this release is the price. The one big problem with Stitcher over the years is that it was very expensive. Now, with this new release, a much more reasonable price has been placed on Stitcher. When Stitcher first came out, it was one of the best programs available to make any kind of panorama. Now, with incredibly impressive Photomerge in Photoshop CS3 & CS4, a simple panorama can be created in Photoshop. To create Circular, full Cylinder, and QTVR images, Stitcher is still the master. However, there are some problems with this release that makes version 5.7 more desirable. The HDR features are lacking and give a poor example of what HDR can do.
Normally with a weak release of a good program, I can always recommend it to those who do not have the application yet—even though it might not be a recommended update for those who already have the application. This time, however, due to the problems with Authoring Controls and the poor HDR features, it's hard to recommend the product to anyone. The advances in Stitcher 2009 are nobel in intent, but fail to deliver.
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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