PANOVOLO for macOS (beta) is now available

[PanoVolo]

I asked for the trial version key and 8 hours later nothing. I tried it with all the watermarks but it is hard to see detail with that stuff all over the image.

How does PANOVOLO fare compared to PTGUI?

Hi Eric, excellent question. Let me explain the motivation behind PANOVOLO.

When it comes to the sheer number of features, nothing can beat PtGUI. They've been in this field for 20+ years, and they can stitch panoramas from pretty much any type of camera and source, and they have any feature you can ask for and then some.

That being said, their workflow is what I call a traditional, old school panorama stitching. You pick the images you want to stitch. You click on the button to align them based on keypoint detection and matching. The preview will appear in which you can do tweaks edits and adjustments, and finally when you are happy you can render and then save your final panorama with some additional adjustments if needed. It will also ask you to save the project file in case you want to come back to re-stitching the same set of images later.

This is all fine and dandy if you only want to stitch a couple of panoramas and spend hours tweaking them. In the olde days of panoramas (back to Brown and Lowe's seminal research paper and AutoStitch) you would go into the field with your DSLR and tripod, bring back a handful of panos and then spend a day or two stitching and postprocessing.

Drones changed all that. I can fly my drone and bring back 10+ panoramas from a single flight easily. If I have to go through the multistep process of stitching of each of these panoramas, it takes way too much time and effort and frankly just does not scale and frustrates the user.

So, PANOVOLO was born from the idea that drone panoramas require a completely different, streamlined workflow. By default, we don't work with individual images, we work with directories, because that's how a drone stores panoramas. You pick the directory you want to stitch, decide if you want to stitch from DNGs or JPEGs if the directory contains both... and that's it. The algorithm runs and you get your panorama. No multistep process to go through, no project files to save. Batch mode eliminates even the need to select directories one by one, run it on the folder that contains multiple panorama directories and it will process them all and save the images.

On the other side of the spectrum is in-drone stitching. It's simple to use, but as everyone knows quite simplistic, cannot use raw files and often errs because the SOC in the drone does not have the oomph to run the full blown stitching algorithm with all the bells and whistles. So the results are often lacking. PANOVOLO does not compromise on quality - we use a complete algorithm and high dynamic range processing to render the panoramas with the best quality possible.

sorry about the long post, but hopefully it gives a bit of a background why PANOVOLO was created in the first place.

 

[Robert Prior]

If you stitch from JPEGs, the output is JPEG.
If you stitch from DNGs the output is 16-bit TIFF.

I can't try it (ancient Mac running Sierra), but I would suggest that you offer the option for TIFF output in both cases. Even when stitching JPEG files (from my first digital camera in 2004) I output as a TIFF to avoid further compression artifacts.

If your software stitches images taken in autoexposure mode and compensates for that there will be more than 8 bits of dynamic range, so having an option to output as 16-bit TIFF makes sense.

 

[PanoVolo]

I can't try it (ancient Mac running Sierra), but I would suggest that you offer the option for TIFF output in both cases. Even when stitching JPEG files (from my first digital camera in 2004) I output as a TIFF to avoid further compression artifacts.

If your software stitches images taken in autoexposure mode and compensates for that there will be more than 8 bits of dynamic range, so having an option to output as 16-bit TIFF makes sense.

Hi Robert, good suggestion, will add to the list as an option.

 

[TheRock]

Hi TheRock, if you have not received your key yet, please email [email protected] and we will send you one. Sorry about the delay, the trial keys are issued with the manual check and I want to sleep some time too

Got it, it came overnight. Thank you.

 

[TheRock]

Hi Eric, excellent question. Let me explain the motivation behind PANOVOLO.

When it comes to the sheer number of features, nothing can beat PtGUI. They've been in this field for 20+ years, and they can stitch panoramas from pretty much any type of camera and source, and they have any feature you can ask for and then some.

That being said, their workflow is what I call a traditional, old school panorama stitching. You pick the images you want to stitch. You click on the button to align them based on keypoint detection and matching. The preview will appear in which you can do tweaks edits and adjustments, and finally when you are happy you can render and then save your final panorama with some additional adjustments if needed. It will also ask you to save the project file in case you want to come back to re-stitching the same set of images later.

This is all fine and dandy if you only want to stitch a couple of panoramas and spend hours tweaking them. In the olde days of panoramas (back to Brown and Lowe's seminal research paper and AutoStitch) you would go into the field with your DSLR and tripod, bring back a handful of panos and then spend a day or two stitching and postprocessing.

Drones changed all that. I can fly my drone and bring back 10+ panoramas from a single flight easily. If I have to go through the multistep process of stitching of each of these panoramas, it takes way too much time and effort and frankly just does not scale and frustrates the user.

So, PANOVOLO was born from the idea that drone panoramas require a completely different, streamlined workflow. By default, we don't work with individual images, we work with directories, because that's how a drone stores panoramas. You pick the directory you want to stitch, decide if you want to stitch from DNGs or JPEGs if the directory contains both... and that's it. The algorithm runs and you get your panorama. No multistep process to go through, no project files to save. Batch mode eliminates even the need to select directories one by one, run it on the folder that contains multiple panorama directories and it will process them all and save the images.

On the other side of the spectrum is in-drone stitching. It's simple to use, but as everyone knows quite simplistic, cannot use raw files and often errs because the SOC in the drone does not have the oomph to run the full blown stitching algorithm with all the bells and whistles. So the results are often lacking. PANOVOLO does not compromise on quality - we use a complete algorithm and high dynamic range processing to render the panoramas with the best quality possible.

sorry about the long post, but hopefully it gives a bit of a background why PANOVOLO was created in the first place.

Thank you and great idea. I like what I am getting from PANOVOLO so far. This is from a 26 image Air2S shot of Palau's Nikko Bay. Evenly stitched. Cropped manually. Kicked out as a TIFF by PANOVOLO and then edited and saved as a jpg. Pretty slick.

 

[PanoVolo]

Thank you and great idea. I like what I am getting from PANOVOLO so far. This is from a 26 image Air2S shot of Palau's Nikko Bay. Evenly stitched. Cropped manually. Kicked out as a TIFF by PANOVOLO and then edited and saved as a jpg. Pretty slick.View attachment 169912

wow amazing colors.

As I was writing above, if you want to render it as interactive 360x180 photosphere don't use autocrop as it will crop it from the required 2:1 width:height ratio. I will add a warning about this in the future release.