Users need to pay at least € 99 to use it after a free trial. When running on 8-core, for example, the lower speed makes it more likely to crash.ĥ. Autopano is unstable under some conditions. Users could enjoy a high speed while it is slower than other applications when producing high-quality stitching.Ĥ. Since all tools show icons without any text, users have to guess their meanings first.ģ. The beginners have to learn for a while.Ģ. Although the latest version allows users to customize the software with extensive plugins, it is not an easy-to-use application. Autopano is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.ġ. It is compatible with over 400 formats, including camera RAW files.Ĥ. Autopano could correct color and exposure differences between source photos automatically.ģ. Although it is the first application to detect photos automatically, it does not mean it is perfect software. By contrast, Autopano Giga took less than 40s including the time it takes to press the three buttons to get the job done.Autopano is one of the most popular automated photo stitchers. On a test involving a single row of three images with 8 megapixels, Autostitch took 82 seconds. Software should figure out how much is needed and try to manage with what is available. Speaking of this, expecting users to tell software how much memory to use is silly. It is easy to notice that this software runs out of memory before most others, even after overriding the pathetic default with the maximum of 1.99 GB. After all, anything that gives lower quality than what you get from free software, is a waste of time.Īutostitch shows weaknesses in areas of memory consumption and speed. As such, Autostitch should now be considered the baseline for stitching software in terms of quality. Today, Autostitch is the basis of many commercial package who have refined the blending and stitching algorithms even further. When Autostitch first appeared, it was considered absolutely amazing since it leaped ahead of previous technologies. There are issues dealing with lens artifacts such as flare that shift along with camera movements. Sharpness is well preserved and reasonable around stitching boundaries. The feature matching is really good, generally much better than can be done by hand which requires extreme precision. Compared to traditional stitching programs, this is a huge improvement as those frequently produce obvious seams. The quality of a panorama depends not only on the software used but on the individual images that for the panorama.Īutostitch pioneered automatic stitching and produces good quality output without user-input. This provides plenty of opportunities to image quality get destroyed, producing areas of softness, details of unnatural appearance and visible seems. Features must be aligned, distorted, stretched, corrected and blended. Output Quality & PerformanceĬreating a panorama by stitching images is an extremely complex operation. It really seems like the application only really needs two buttons: Open, which would show the options dialog before starting to stitch, and Exit for those who have not discovered the X icon to close windows. The final menu, Help, again has a single item, About. Once you make the habit of changing options first and opening files second, the Start item is no longer needed. This is used in case the images were already opened and the options were changed after. The third menu, Stitch, has a single item as well, Start. Other Options controls the amount of system memory used and the JPEG quality of the output. Selecting 100% gives the highest resolution output. Output Size is used to control the size of the produced panorama by specifying a width, height or percentage of the maximum possible resolution. Do not panic though, the two important option groups are understandable. These seem like implementation parameters which are only understandable by the author. Most of them have cryptic names like SIFT Image Size, Theta Max or Phi Min. This item brings up a rather large dialog which shows seven groups of options. Selecting Open lets the user choose images and Autostitch starts stitching temp together immediately.Ī better place to start is with the Edit menu which only has one item called Options. The File menu has two options: Open and Exit. The window never shows anything more, it is just there to hold the menu bar. When the program starts, it presents the user with an almost empty window. Using Autostitch is simplicity itself, partly because it does nearly everything automatically and partly because it does very little.
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