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Provides: Combines multiple images into a variety of formats from simple panorama all the way to QTVRs
Developer: Realviz
Requirements: Intel Mac required for Stitcher Unlimited, G4 required for Stitcher Pro or Stitcher Express
Retail Price: $580; $249 upgrade from v. 5.x; $130 upgrade from v5.5 Unlimited
We live inside a beach ball—at least if you take photos. If you take one photo, our beach ball existence is not really relevant, but if you take a series of photos with the intent to stitch them together into a panorama, than the dynamics of how to process that curved surface on a 2D view become more and more complex. (Consider the dynamics cartographers have to deal with when trying to replicate the surface of the earth on a globe.) I've dealt with Stitcher twice before with Stitcher 4 and Stitcher 5. Stitcher 5.5 introduced the ability to stitch a QTVR image from a fish-eye lens. Now, the latest version of Stitcher (5.6), the program is finally a Universal application and has the ability to work with HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. As this is the only new "feature" in the new version, this review will focus on the new HDR capability.
[Note: This is one part of a loose three-part review of Photomatix, Stitcher, and Nodal Ninja. Nodal Ninja is a device that holds your camera on a tripod at the entrance point, also known as the Nodal point. Photomatix lets you combine multiple exposures of the same shot to achieve a greater amount of dynamic range in the image. Nodal Ninja supports the camera on a tripod at the exposure point to obtain the best possible panorama. Stitcher can combine multiple images to create a panorama and can now create a panorama using HDR images from programs like Photomatix. These are three separate reviews but are related in kind.]
Sadly, what I've not seen yet are changes in the little things that bugged me a bit in earlier releases that I assumed would be fixed along the way. I've not mentioned them in the past, but I will this time later in the review. Overall, Stitcher is still a very dynamic program that does exactly what it sets out to do: collect a series of photos, and process them into a panorama or QTVR (or Flash object). Most of the work is automated, but occasionally the automation is hampered by images with insufficient information and/or simply doesn't do as good a job as it should.
Up front, one big question to ask is how necessary is Stitcher with the new Panoramic (Photomerge) capabilities in Photoshop? This is an interesting question, and it depends on how the photos were taken, how many photos you plan on stitching together, and what format you want to end up with. If you hand-hold your camera, Photoshop does a better job of creating a Panorama than Stitcher can from the same photos. For one thing, Stitcher practically requires that you use an "Entrance Point"support (such as the Nodal Ninja) for your camera on a tripod. Hand-held photos do not work well in Stitcher, while Photoshop does do an amazing job with them. Below is a panorama taken with three images but hand held. It looks pretty good at the greatly reduced size, but notice the ghosting on the rock at 100% on the bottom left. Fixing this is not very hard in Stitcher, all you have to do is to create some "Stencils" in one (or more) of the images to tell Stitcher to ignore that part of any given image as I did on the bottom right. Photoshop does this automatically. If you are using an "Entrance Pupil" support for your camera, either program will do an excellent job. [When using an entrance pupil device, you still may need to stencil out someone who "walks" from one shot to the next as you create multiple images, but that's a different issue.]
However, where Photoshop starts to bog down is when you have more and more shots in the Panorama. Stitching images is a processor involved operation. Either way, it's going to take a bit of time. However, at a certain point, Stitcher is simply more efficient at this. The panorama I use extensively in this review consisted of 30 HDR images (two rows of 15 images, compiled from a total of 90 images (3 per HDR image)). Each HDR image was about 30MB. I tried to have Photoshop create the image, and after an hour I force-quit Photoshop. I do believe it could be done, but I didn't have the time to sit and watch my computer. It took Stitcher 10-1/2 minutes to create the full circle of two rows of images. [This was done on a MacPro 3.0 Dual processor with 8GB of RAM (and lots of other programs running) working in Mac OS X v10.4.10. On my G5 Dual 2.5 MHz (2GB of RAM) the stitching process for the same HDR images took 25 minutes.]
One of the other advantages of Stitcher is the number of formats you can create your image (see the image of panorama types below) when processing JPEG, TIFF, or PSD images.
Again, the primary reasons to upgrade to Stitcher Unlimited is that this release of Stitcher is Universal, and it can load and work with HDR images. Unfortunately Stitcher cannot handle RAW images. If you have any, you do have to convert them into TIFF or JPEGs before bringing them into Stitcher. Photoshop can deal with RAW images (after being processed via ACR) and HDR images as well. However, keep in mind that working with HDR images significantly decreases the potential outputs you have available to you. More on this later.
For creating HDR images, you can either use Photoshop or Photomatix. In my Photomatix review, you can see that I preferred the results from that over Photoshop. Regardless how they are created, you will end up with an ".hdr" suffix. In my Photomatix review, I mentioned how Adobe's Bridge is a handy program to verify multiple versions of the same image prior to running a batch mode. This showed up when I was working on multiple images for a batch mode operation. As seen below, I determined that three images were required for the creation of the HDR in this outdoor shot. By setting my Content window to 3-wide, I can quickly scan the whole range of photos and verify that I have three of each shot and all three have three different exposures (although if you find one "off" image (e.g., wrong shutter speed) at this point the whole shoot might be shot. If you used Photomatix to create your HDR images, you can use the JPEGs concurrently created in Stitcher as they will have the results of the Tone Mapping done during the Batch processing. If you use the HDR images, the 32 bit images will be understood and processed by Stitcher.
When you bring the images into Stitcher, the thumbnails of all the images line up along the bottom of the window. Curiously, after your images have loaded, there is a message asking if your focal length was deduced properly. [Note: These apply to standard film focal lengths. So, in the case below, my Canon's focal length of 17mm is in fact 27mm on a 35mm camera.] What I find curious is that the default button for this is "No." Unless you know different, click "Yes." If the correct answer was "No," a window pops up with the chance to change the focal length.
The best way to take panorama photos is in Portrait mode. If your camera doesn't have a position or alignment information to tell programs what orientation (Portrait or Landscape) the image(s) were taken, all of the images will need to be rotated CW or CCW. To get all of your images active so they can be rotated all together, clicking on one image and then hitting "Command-a" will do the trick.
- Gripe #1: Selection of the thumbnails is unlike most other Mac programs. If you Click on one thumbnail on the left side of the screen and shift-click on the thumbnail on the right side, only the two selected thumbnails will be active. Normally when you Shift-click a range, all of the items in between the two selected items become active. Not with Stitcher, in which Shift-click acts like Control-click (selecting discontinuous items) but Control-click doesn't do anything.
- Gripe #2: If you close this window (click on the close "red dot"), Stitcher quits. Gone. If you want to start a new panorama, you need to go to the first icon, wait until the rollover icons appear to the right and select the furthest one on the right for "New" and continue from there. I can understand how it may not be possible to have multiple windows open in Stitcher, but that doesn't mean closing its lone window means the program has to quit. At least provide a window with two options that say "Start new project" and "Quit."
The slider on the bottom of the window controls the size of the thumbnails. If you move the slider alllll the way to the left, the thumbnails will be removed from the window. There is a setting in Stitcher's Preference to have the thumbnails grow as you mouse past them like the icons in the Mac's Dock. I hate this feature in both programs, and fortunately you can turn it off in both. The "a" on the bottom right indicates that the images are now in "alignment," and if you move the foci of the image (by Option-click & drag), the image will move only horizontally or vertically. This is a nice change from the past when you'd go to the trouble of aligning an image and any movement you subsequently did pulled it out of alignment. I believe the "h" in the lower right is because I'm using HDR images. I couldn't find anything in the manual to verify that. Also note on the extreme bottom right are two diagonal lines indicating that this is the resize-window handle. This has been missing in past versions and it's nice to see the visual verification that this is the resize-handle (perhaps it was gripes in past reviews that this small addition was added). Be warned: the size of your window can have significant effect on how some of your images will appear for Rendering and other processes. Generally, you want to extend the size of your window as much as you can on your monitor. If you click on the oval to the left or right of the thumbnails, the thumbnails will advance to the next block of images. Right now you can see six thumbnails, and if you click on the oval you will see the next block of six. The Arrow icon acts like any arrow icon and will scroll through the thumbnails. The sideways-cross is explained further on in the review.
Alternatively, you can use the Image Strip which can be attached or detached to the main window. You can scroll through all of the images using the standard scroll bars or, if you have a super monitor (e.g., 30 inch), you could see all of the images at a time. You cannot vary the size of the thumbnails in the Image Strip.
Each of the icons on the left side of the screen will expand out with more options as you mouse over them, showing options related to the master icon. I find the icons to be particularly incomprehensible, but fortunately there is a pop-up text on all of them if you hover over the image for a moment letting you know what each one is for.
- Gripe #3: I would like to see these pop up names be "always" there. Generally I find these icons mostly incomprehensible. Looking at them, I do not have a clue as to what they imply. When you are working with some 30 HDR images on an Intel Power Mac with 8GB of RAM, it can start to slow down the time for the pop up names to show up. I would like to see a preference for "Name and Icon" or even just "Name."
The first icon is to load images, and from here you can select the folder that has the images you want, and then select all of the images you want to process.
- Gripe #4: I would like a button that says "Select the contents of this folder" in this selection window. Why should I have a folder of just the images I want to use and still have to Shift-select each one?
One of the coolest buttons is the second one from the top called "Auto Stitch," which was introduced in Stitcher 5. Click on that, and Stitcher will examine each image and stitch all (or most) of your images, provided there is enough information in the image for Stitcher to work with. The amount time required for this depends upon the number of images to process and the speed of your processor.
Occasionally, there will not be enough information in your image for Stitcher to do its Auto Stitching, and you will need to come in and give it a hand. Images that are self-stitched will have have a green square in the upper right. An image that isn't stitched yet has no square. To manually stitch an image, select the image that you want to stitch and any other image that overlays the unstitched image. There is a problem here though because if you select the images via the thumbnails and right-click, you get a different set of Contextual menu than if you right-click on the stitched image, as seen below. On the left, you see the options available if you right-click on an image in the stitched region. On the right is the contextual menu for right-clicking the thumbnails.
- Gripe #5: There are no contextual menus for the thumbnails in the Image Strip. These should have Contextual menus as well.
- Gripe #6: I see no reason why these Contextual menus for images can't or shouldn't be the same. Otherwise, the content in each should mirror the other as much as possible. Currently, this is just plain confusing.
[Note: The "Edit Image Editor" selection can be set to use any photograph application such as Photoshop. If you feel you need to "doctor" an image while it is currently loaded in Stitcher, you can "fix" the image and then "Reload Image from Disk" and continue. This is very cool and efficient.]
Anyhow, you can select (Shift-click) the two images and right-click in the Stitcher window, select "Manual Stitch" as seen below. (Both images do not need to be in the window; one image can be in the Thumbnails, as well. The catch is you need to mouse-down on the image in the Window to get the correct Contextual menu.) Below, you can see the image that I need to stitch is on the right, and it's easy to see why Stitcher didn't have enough information to do it automatically. What I need to do is to find two specific locations on the top of the tree on the right side of the left image to match the same parts of the tree on the right image.
This is easier than one might think. When you mouse-down (and hold, not click), you will see a greatly magnified view of where to place that first location dot. After placing the location dot on the left image, next you move to the right image. When you mouse-down (and hold, not click) on the right image, you see a larger magnified box and, to the left, a smaller magnified box of where your location dot is on the left image. (Note the chromatic aberration seen in these images. While clearly visible at 400% magnification, the good news is that the final image is very likely going to be reduced greatly in size, meaning that these will be lost. If you are creating a panorama that will be displayed full size and/or increased in size, it's best to remove these in the individual image before you assemble the panorama.)
Once you've completed two location dots on both images, the "Stitch" button becomes active and you can stitch the images. If you make a mistake or need to try an alternate point, simply select the point and press your Delete key."
This technique for manual stitching images is significantly better than the previous version's technique for which you have to eyeball-align the images in the stitcher window and then either Manual Stitch or Force Stitch the images. However, the option of Force Stitching has been removed, and in my mind this is a strange loss. In my sample above, I did have a smidgen of image to work with, but if all I had was "sky," I'm not sure how I would or could stitch that into the image.
At this point, you need to Align the image and also figure out what you want to be the center point of your image. As mentioned earlier, how you have your Stitcher window presented (width and height) has a significant effect on how the final image will be manipulated in Stitcher and how the image will be finally rendered. In addition, whatever you have centered in the Stitcher window will be centered in the final panorama. For this, there is an interesting trick that has multiple uses—the Contextual menu selection: "Look At." If you select any image and select "Look At" from the Contextual menu, it will be centered in your Stitcher window. Once you have your selected image centered, you then can select the "Auto Align" icon, third from top in the Stitcher window. If your image has an obvious horizon, this will be automatic and done.
Alternatively, you may have to select the second icon out, called Align, which brings the Stitcher window into the Align mode. Here, you drag straight lines out on either known horizontal or known vertical objects. Once you have collected as many of these as you think necessary or as many as you can find, then you can click the Align button and Stitcher will align the image.
The next operation is the "Equalize" button (always grayed out if you have HDR images). This is used to balance out changes in luminosity caused by variations in images. You will probably not be able to see any changes in the Stitcher window, but it will show up in the final rendered panorama. [Note: If you did not place your camera in Manual mode, causing significant changes in lightness as you move past light and dark regions, you will probably be disappointed at the results. Stitcher can only do so much here. This is another area where Photoshop's Photomerge is very forgiving. That notwithstanding, it is much better to set your camera on Manual and set the aperture and shutter speed appropriately—you will get better results either way.]
The last issue is to Render the image, here's where it gets (pick one) fun, frustrating, confusing, or bewildering. As good as the Stitcher manual is up to here, at this point the manual can bog down tremendously.
While I am not focusing any detail on QTVR images in this review, I do have one for the series of images I did for this review. (If you haven't dealt with QTVR images, drag your mouse to the right to move right, left, top, or down accordingly. In addition, if you press the Shift key you will zoom in and pressing the Control key will zoom out.)
The Render window changes depending on what kind of images you have and how you want to have your images rendered. For example, the screen shot below shows that the image will end up as a JPG so the tabs on the top display what available for a JPEG image. (Also note the kinds of renderings one might select from if your images are JPEG, TIFF, or PSD as shown in the second image in this review.
Of particular note, I do want to point out the field called "Filename" under the heading "Render Properties." If you try to click in there, you probably can't. What you can see is the location path of where the file will be placed when rendering is complete. Instead of typing into the logical place within the field, rather you click on the Ellipsis button to the right of the Filename field. When this is clicked you get a standard "Save ..." window with the standard placing abilities. If you do have some text in the Filename field, you may be able to click into the region of the text you'd like to change. This would be much easier if there simply was a "Save" or Save as..." button in this location.
- Gripe #7: This window is amazingly not sticky. It always comes up with the Spherical Image as the image Type. If you constantly select Cylindrical, it will not remember it. Yes, you can set a variety of preferences in the Settings Management, but I would love some of these settings to be sticky regardless.
If you are working with HDR images, you have significantly decreased rendering options, as seen below. Again, this is significantly less than what can be done with JPEG, TIFF, and/or PSD documents as shown in the second image from the top of this review.
At first, it comes off as a big disappointment that if you are working with HDR images, you cannot create a QTVR image. However, when you stop to think about it, you can't. There is no such thing as an HDR-QTVR format. An HDR image is a 32 bit image, and if you read the Photomatix review, you will see that you can't properly display a 32 bit image on a standard monitor. So, to have a QTVR that can't be displayed wouldn't be very productive. If you want to have the result of an HDR series of images, take the JPEG or TIFF images created during the Photomatix batch mode processing and use those to create your QTVR image.
[Note: If you are creating HDR images in Photomatix to move into Stitcher 5.6 via the batch mode operation, it is essential to click the "Don't Crop" checkbox. Stitcher must have images all of the same size, and if an image is even 1 pixel smaller in any dimension, the process will fail.]
To get a better understanding what each of these formats can display, see the following images:
- Cylindrical rendering: This maps the entire cylinder onto a flat surface. It does not distort the vertical lines, but does distort the horizontal lines. This can put up to an entire 360° panorama onto a 2D surface.
- Spherical rendering: This renders the complete sphere onto a flat surface. This distorts both the horizontal and vertical lines, and is best for vertical images. Because I do not have a complete 180° vertical image here, the full spherical distortion is not seen in the image below, but can be implied by the distortion of the tree on the left side.
- Snapshot rendering: Provides a "WYSITSW" (What You See In The Stitcher Window) perspective. If you've set the perspective point out deep, you will see a lot of distortion on the sides of the image. Also note that you can only see one part of the image (that which was showing in the Stitcher Window) as the rest of the image is out of view.
- Cubical rendering: This maps the entire sphere onto six faces of a cube into six separate files. This view is very handy if you want to do some "post production" on any of the faces. For example, in the "Top" face I did not close the top of the image. By opening that image in Photoshop, I can "fill" the hole and then reload the entire panorama via the File menu -> Load Panorama. All you have to do is select one of the six images and the rest will load, letting you continue to create a (cubic) QTVR. [Note: the formal cubical structure can be seen in the Stitcher window image earlier in the review.]
When creating a panorama, you do not need to use all of your image. From the Render Area tab, you can click on the "Define Render Area" button to select (crop) part of an image as seen below. By the way, note the small visual bug seen in the far right lower region of the image below. The right 10 pixels or so are upside down. This doesn't affect the final image in any way, but is a bit disconcerting when first observed.
When you save an HDR image in any of the four layouts, you can save it in four different formats, as seen in the image below. JPEG and TIFF are straightforward. However, keep in mind that any JPEG or TIFF image will automatically be an 8 bit image and the advantage of the HDR images will be lost immediately upon rendering. That is you will be rendering the image as it appears in 32 bit mode in a monitor that probably cannot see all of that information.
An example of that is the JPG below. The image as shown was from an HDR image and saved out as a JPEG. The bright spot in the right center of the image is the sun hiding behind a tree. I figured this would be a great place to see the capabilities of HDR images. However, from the JPEG below, there's no good place to further process this image because the dynamic range from the image has all been removed.
(Click image for larger version)
The "exr" format is also a high dynamic range image format developed by Industrial Light and Magic. The "hdr" format is the same one as used in Photoshop and Photomatix. By saving an HDR image directly from Stitcher, you can now open the HDR image in Photomatix and do the Tone Mapping required to save it as a 16 or 8 bit image that we can see. Once this is done, the image looks as shown below. Interestingly, there were some curious light flares that showed up after Tone Mapping in this image that were not seen in the JPEG image.
(Click image for larger version)
One demonstrated strength of the HDR image can be seen at close up of the couple under the tree as seen below. Considering that this image was taken directly facing a tree covering the sun with direct sunlight on the grass behind the couple, this is an impressive shot.
One small bit of technical data: Stitcher assembles by reference each of the images in an image. This makes the size of a Stitcher document fairly small. The size of the Stitcher document of the park was about 1MB regardless if the document was a JPEG or HDR version. The size of all of the hdr images for the park was 762MB and the size of the JPEG files (created by Photomatix) was 40MB (but this can vary considerably depending upon how they are saved).
It is important to focus on the pricing strategy of Realviz. Stitcher is not a cheap program, and this is the second release that provided only a single upgrade feature (with the exception that the Mac version is also now Universal). The upgrade cost, while less than a new purchase of the program, is nothing to be sneezed at. Couple that with the draconian measures that Realviz has you go through to lock your copy to one computer. The process is that after installing Stitcher, a "machine number" is created for your computer. This is sent to Realviz and they send you a code for that program to work on that computer. If you own Stitcher Unlimited version, a second license is available for a second computer. While I do understand and appreciate the need for software vendors to protect their property, other measures are available, such as what Adobe has done with their "2" activations. The advantage of the activation approach is that it can accommodate unexpected changes. Thus, if I have Stitcher on my work and home computer but now I want to demonstrate it to a group, I can't. The advantage of Adobe's approach is that it is simple to un-activate my (say) home installation, activate my wife's laptop and reverse the process after my demonstration is done. This has worked well, and there have been very few problems with the "activation" approach.
In short, I do like Stitcher. If you want to create multi-shot panoramas (e.g., more than eight images), the speed efficiency is reason enough to consider using Stitcher over Photoshop. If you only hand-hold your camera for panoramas, then you have to use Photoshop, as Stitcher was not made for hand-held panoramas. If you want to create QTVR or Pure Player movies, you need Stitcher, as Photoshop just can't do that. If you do not currently have Stitcher, then you might consider stepping up to the strengths that Stitcher provides. However, if you already have Stitcher 5.1, then only if you use a fisheye lens should you have considered upgrading to Stitcher 5.5, and only if you want to take advantage of HDR images should you consider stepping up to Stitcher 5.6 Unlimited. The good news is that Realviz has three different versions of Stitcher available: Stitcher Express, Stitcher Pro, and Stitcher Unlimited. There is a good comparison chart with what each provides here, and I suggest you examine this fully before any purchase.
Because of the limited new functionality in this version, I am only giving it a 3 "A" rating. If you are new to Stitcher, by all means, I strongly recommend the program. If you already have a copy, it is hard for me to tell you to spend your money unless the fish-eye lens and/or HDR features are sufficient enough.
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___________ 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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