Creation of a panoramic image. Creating a panorama online. Installing and activating PTGui Pro

12.03.2020

A program that allows you to create full-fledged 360-degree panoramic images based on a series of ordinary photographs. Possibility of automatic detection focal length, perspective distortion correction, automatic lens distortion correction, automatic stitching of photos into huge panoramic images, creating a smooth transition from one picture to another.

Has an easy to use user interface. The package includes excellent tools for perfecting and combining images in automatic mode. offer tools for automatic alignment, enhancement and gluing of images, creating panoramas of a spherical shape. The adaptive image alignment technique ensures that there are no visible seams, even if there are moving objects in the frame. The listed functions allow you to create virtual tours in the form of applications Java or Flash, as well as mark active points on images. The user will be able to save the results of his work in the form of a screensaver, as well as print them as a poster or a multi-page document. The built-in database contains information about six hundred models of modern digital cameras, including common compact cameras and SLR cameras.

Program features:

Seamless gluing of a series of images into a flat or 360-degree panorama
Seamless pasting of multi-level images
Support creating 360×180 degree spherical panoramas
Automatic alignment and blending of a series of images
Fully 16-bit working environment for 16-bit images
Detection of more than 1200 digital cameras by EXIF information
Automatic vignetting correction
Adjusting the exposure of imported images
Automatic panorama exposure compensation
Manual adjustment of all post-processing steps when creating a panorama
Checkpoint editor
Export to interactive Java and Flash panoramas
Export panorama as a screen saver or executable file
Save to a variety of graphic files, including JPG, TIFF, PSD, BMP, PNG, PCX, RAS, and TGA
Import images in JPG, TIFF, PSD, BMP, PNG, PCX, RAS, IFF and TGA formats
Import of existing panoramic images for further processing
Import about 300 RAW formats including DNG, CRW, NEF, CR2, RAW, MRW, DCR, ORF, ARW, PEF, etc.
Poster printing function
Support for cylindrical, spherical and perspective panorama design
Hotspot editing for Java and Flash panoramas to create virtual tours
Using filters for the created panorama (clarity, color balance, brightness and contrast, etc.)
Export individual panorama images as layered PSD file or multipage TIFF file

On the this moment there are many different utilities for photo processing on the computer software market, and many such utilities are also presented on our website. This time I want to bring to your attention the program PanoramaStudio Pro, which will appeal to any amateur photographer, even a beginner, even if he has been doing this difficult task for many years. And all because the program is not only easy to manage, takes up little space and has a nice interface, but because it is also of high quality.

The main direction of the PanoramaStudio Pro program is the creation of panoramic shots. But for starters, you can also process images by rotating, cropping or scaling, so to speak - preparing a photo before placing it in a panorama. After adding your chosen photos, PanoramaStudio Pro will combine them into a uniform high-quality panorama, with smooth transitions that you won't even notice. And the program will do it all quickly and efficiently. In addition, the utility works with all known image formats, so you do not have to convert them additionally.

Download PanoramaStudio Pro in Russian

You can download the PanoramaStudio Pro program for compiling panoramic photos on our website for free by clicking on the link below. For the full and convenient operation of the program, you will need to carry out a simple treatment and Russification. How to do all this - find the information below. After all these simple manipulations, which will take you just a couple of minutes, you will be able to enjoy the high-quality work of the program and the most beautiful panoramic images!

Copy the Order_ru.html and panoramastudio.qm files to the directory of the installed program with a replacement.

1. Install the program and close.
2. File PanoramaStudio3Pro.exe resp. bit depth copy with replacement in the folder with the program.

When photographing a beautiful landscape or an interesting architectural monument, who has not had to regret that the lens of the camera is not able to capture everything in its entirety, so that automatic panorama photo creation. Separate frames do not give such an impression as you get when looking at the landmark with your own eyes. I really want to get a photo that will have a complete image of the object being shot, that is, a panoramic photo. The problem is not new, it was tried to be solved back in the days of film cameras. We solved it in three ways.

The first way is to use short-focus lenses with an extended field of view. The logical development has led to super short throw lenses with an extremely wide angle of capture, the so-called fisheye lenses. disadvantage this method image acquisition is an extremely strong image distortion. Indeed, transferring the image around the camera to a flat surface is akin to trying to smooth the halves of a rubber ball on a flat table.

The second way is the creation of cameras with movable optics, in which the lens rotates during shooting, creating parts of the image one by one on the film. Such cameras include, for example, cameras "Horizon", which provide an image capture angle of 120 degrees. In this case, shooting is carried out on a regular 35 mm film, only the frame size is not the classic 24x36 mm, but 24x58 mm. Naturally, to print such photos, you need a special attachment for a photo enlarger.

The third path that many amateur photographers have taken (I also went through this) is taking pictures with an ordinary camera and printing ordinary photos. But then the photos were joined to each other, the superimposed parts of the photos were cut off, and the resulting mosaic was pasted onto a sheet of paper. It turned out well, although the cropped borders of individual photos were visible even with very careful fitting and careful cropping. In addition, the camera lens always gives distortion, so the exact docking of photos is impossible, we can only talk about more or less acceptable image quality.

Now film cameras are used only by professionals and old seasoned amateur photographers who would never exchange their cameras (with excellent optics, by the way) for digital cameras. But to us, mere mortals, digital photography has given us powerful means of obtaining images of everything that is dear and interesting to us. I will not talk about the many possibilities of digital photography, today we have a different topic - obtaining panoramic images.

Not surprisingly, almost simultaneously with the advent of digital cameras appeared computer programs for processing digital photos. Naturally, the creation of panoramas was also included in the list of necessary computer processing tasks. However, this turned out to be a very difficult task. The two main problems that arise when combining two or more images into one panoramic image are the following: the geometric distortion of images, which I already mentioned, and the brightness and color distortions that arise due to the automatic adjustment of digital cameras to the scene being shot. Since the task turned out to be more difficult than it seemed at first glance, programs for creating panoramas appeared much later than programs for simple correction of digital photographs, and, in addition, these programs were quite expensive.

Despite the fact that free software packages were developed, for example, Panorama tools, it was quite difficult to work with them, they were controlled from the program line, which was an almost impossible task for a simple computer user.

Naturally, the developer community of free software could not pass by such a task, and as a result of their efforts, a free program for creating digital panoramic photos, which has now reached a level accessible for use by almost anyone who knows how to photograph digital camera and basic computer skills.

So, I present! hugin is a program that uses the Panorama Tools package to create panoramas, but provides exceptionally convenient tools for working. The program has been translated into various languages, including Russian. At the moment, the latest version of the program has the number 0.7.0 and was released to the public on October 4, 2008. The program is available for operating systems Linux, MacOS and, of course, Windows. You can download this program by clicking on the icon.

Linux users, as well as happy Macintosh users, will figure out for themselves which of the three files to download, and Windows users will probably also guess that they need a file that contains Win32 in the name, that is, hugin-0.7.0_win32-setup.exe .

Installing the program is quite simple. It is distributed under the GPL license, that is, free of charge, so during installation you can safely agree with the license by selecting (when it appears) the item "I accept the agreement", and on all other pages by clicking the "Next" button ("Next"). The program itself determines which language is used on your computer and immediately switches to it. However, if necessary, the language can be changed in the program settings by selecting one of seventeen, including Catalan and Ukrainian.

The program allows full automatic panorama creation, but this does not always work out if the original photographs do not provide enough information for their exact "stitching". In this case, work is provided in manual, or rather, semi-automatic mode. Let's look at the process of creating a panorama, starting with taking the original photos.

Photographing

In order to get a panorama with acceptable quality, when photographing, you need to immediately take measures to eliminate possible errors and distortion. To do this, pay attention to the following:
1. It is advisable to take photographs in order, for example, from left to right. Although the program can determine the order of the pictures, it is better to have all the pictures in the right order.
2. For normal photo stitching, the program must highlight a certain amount of identical dots in adjacent photographs. This requires that the photographs have overlapping areas in which there are sufficiently well-defined details. An overlap of about 25% of the image size is usually sufficient.

Practical tip: When shooting, look for some prominent landmark (circled in red in the photo) on the right side of the image (tree, corner of the building), after taking the picture, turn the camera so that this landmark is on the left side of the image, and take the next frame while paying attention to the next landmark on the right side of the image.
3. Try not to make tilted panoramas. Their processing is usually more difficult, and the result is likely to disappoint you. Pay close attention to the horizontal position of the image, when you tilt the camera, the panorama will turn out to be stepped and slanted.
4. Watch the angle of the camera. If the horizon line is higher on one frame and lower on the other, the panorama will also be stepped. Of course, you can crop the resulting image, but this will lose part of the image at the top and bottom.
5. As you pan the camera horizontally, make sure that the lens stays in the same position as possible. Frames taken from different points cannot be combined with acceptable quality.
6. The camera must be stable. When shooting handheld, try to keep the camera as still as possible. It is best to shoot from a tripod, but quite decent results are obtained when shooting with a short shutter speed (in automatic shooting mode - in good light). Night panorama can only be made when shooting from a tripod.
7. It is advisable to use manual exposure setting and keep it constant when shooting all panorama frames. However, the hugin program has the ability to adjust the brightness of the image, which allows you to get good results even when using simple digital cameras.

Despite such an extensive list of requirements, it is quite easy to implement them. Try it and you will see for yourself what is done wrong, and take it into account in the future. In any case, even if at first the panorama does not satisfy you, you will have individual photographs, so all your work will not be in vain.

Automatic panorama creation with hugin

We will consider working with the program when installed on a computer operating system Windows.

Run the program by selecting the Hugin section in the Start menu, and the hugin item in it. A program window will open with the title "Hugin - a graphical interface for creating panoramas", and in it the first tab is "Assistant". If we are lucky, and the photos meet all the requirements of the program, we will not need other tabs.

When creating a panorama automatically, you need to perform only three actions:
1. Upload pictures.
2. Merge pictures.
3. Create a panorama.

Uploading pictures is very easy. After clicking the "1. Load pictures..." button, the usual dialog box will open, in which you need to select the photos from which the panorama will be formed. Some drawback is that there is no preview of the selected file in the selection window. Therefore, before you start working with hugin, you need to view the captured frames in another program, for which I recommend the free IrfanView photo viewer and editor, and note down the names of the files that will be included in the panorama creation process. When uploading files to hugin, you can select all the necessary files at once. Let me remind novice Windows users that this can be done by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on the names of all the necessary files one by one.

For example, let's take three pictures that were taken specifically to illustrate the process of creating a panorama:

The pictures were deliberately taken with some violations of the rules given above - the horizontal position of the camera was not maintained, the exposure in the evening was taken too low, which increased the amount of noise in the image. This will allow to some extent evaluate the capabilities of the hugin program.

So, let's upload these three snapshots. After uploading the images, the second item on the tab will become available - "2. Merge ...". Pressing this button launches a program that searches for points in images that can be used to stitch frames into a panorama.
The process is complex and time consuming, its progress is displayed in a pop-up window, but sometimes it may seem that the computer is frozen and does nothing. Be patient, and after a while, depending on the number of shots and their size, sometimes after a few minutes, the work will be completed, this window will automatically close and a new one will open, called "Panorama Preview". In this window, you can see a small image of the generated panorama. For convenience, it is better to immediately expand this window to full screen. If the images fit together, you will see a normal image, which may be curved upwards or downwards.

After processing the uploaded images, I got a curve with a bulge down. In order to straighten the panorama, let's try to select another central point by clicking on it with the left mouse button. The center point of the panorama is located at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical lines in the image.

I had to select a point that is inside the red circle. It is advisable to choose a point located on a vertical line. If the "Auto" button is pressed in the upper part of the "Panorama Preview" window, the image will be immediately rebuilt according to the new center point. After performing this operation, the panorama will be quite straight, but may be tilted to the left or right.

My panorama has a slight tilt to the right. This can be seen if you pay attention to the fact that the horizontal line on the left runs along the back of the garden bench, and on the right - at the level of the second floor of the building. To equalize the tilt, select a point on the edge of the panorama, which should be on the same level as the center point, and right-click on it. This point in my photo is also marked with a red circle.

It is now clearly seen that the shape of the useful image field is strongly distorted. Basically, the distortions come down to a barrel-shaped distortion of the top and bottom edges of the panorama, as well as a rather strong tilt of the right side of the panorama down. If barrel distortion is related to the features of the camera lens, and we can’t do anything about it, then the mutual tilt of the individual parts of the panorama is associated with the tilt of the camera (in this case, intentional) during shooting. This is the main reason why the camera should be held as level as possible while shooting.

There is a black background around the panorama, which is completely unnecessary unless you want to keep it for some aesthetic reason. It can be cropped by moving the sliders located under the panorama and to the right of it. When you hover over the engines, additional hints will appear related to the effect of these engines on the image. I usually adjust the horizontal slider first.

The slider (marked with a red circle) needs to be moved a short distance and wait for the image update to complete. You need to move the slider so that the uneven edges of the image on the left and right are cut off. Keep in mind that image operations are very time consuming, so the response to all your actions may not be as fast as you would like.

Then let's move on to adjusting the vertical slider on the right side of the window (circled in red).
This task will be somewhat more difficult due to the slope of the pictures. The panorama has unfilled places in the upper right corner and in the lower part of the panorama (circled in red ovals). Naturally, they can be cropped by moving the vertical slider, but part of the useful image will be lost.

Sometimes, you have to put up with small defects, or retouch them later in some graphics editor. In my case, there was an almost imperceptible small black space in the upper right corner of the panorama.

At the bottom of the window there are a few more controls that you can leave untouched for now, they are designed for more advanced control of the panorama view.

Now, if the operation of combining images was successful, you can return to the main window of the hugin program. Below the "2. Merge..." button, a brief summary of the success of the merge operation will appear. If the program did not scold you, you can safely press the button "3. Create a panorama ...". You will be asked about the name of the panorama file, and after entering it, the "hugB - Stitching" window will appear and the actual operation of combining frames will be performed. This operation is also very slow.

The result of the work will be a file with the .tif extension, which has a size several times greater than the sum of the sizes of all source files. In my case, it has a size of more than 31 MB! And this is with the size of the source files about 4 MB, the total size is 12.3 MB. A file with the tif extension can be viewed in any graphic viewer or editor, for example, in the same IrfanView, and then saved in a more familiar format, for example, in JPEG. In this case, the file size will decrease significantly (I have 4.7 MB), especially if you set the quality to something other than 100%. I must say that an image saved at 80% quality is almost indistinguishable from an image with 100% quality. Therefore, a slight decrease in quality with a large reduction in file size is justified.

If you are not going to further edit the panorama, you can delete the *.tif file. If any correction is expected, it is better to perform it on source file and only then convert it to the final format. Before saving the image, I lightened it a little with the help of gamma correction in Irfan View and increased the contrast of the image. It remains to carefully examine the file with the .jpg extension and say with a sense of deep satisfaction: "Panoramic photo ready!"
By clicking on the picture, you can download an image with a size of 1283x384, 85 kB.

If the panorama in the preview window appeared in a very distorted form, the images were superimposed on each other, something completely incomprehensible appeared instead of a single line of images, then you are out of luck, automatic panorama creation did not work and you need to create a panorama in semi-automatic mode, manually setting points docking.

How to create a panorama with such an image obtained in automatic mode, we will consider in the next article.

Hugin is a program for creating panoramic images from photographs. In fact, it is a free open source analogue of the utility, which is also based on the Panorama Tools engine.

You can create panoramas both automatically and manually. There are three modes of operation for this: simple, advanced and expert. The first one is ideal for beginners: there is a minimum of complex settings and everything is automated as much as possible. The Panorama Creation Wizard guides you step by step through all the stages of creating a panoramic image, from adding photos to choosing the final format. Advanced mode is something between automatic and manual settings: here the program can perform the main operations itself, but if you need to turn the knobs or manually set the control points, you can take control. In expert mode, all settings are available to the user, as well as the ability to set all values manually without using graphic prompts.

Hugin can determine which lens was used to capture the original images based on the EXIF data and make geometric corrections based on that. If the photos turned out to be uneven due to handheld shooting, the program will automatically align them. There's also vignetting correction and exposure smoothing, which is necessary to ensure that the brightness in the final result is evenly distributed. Among other things, there is a choice of 22 available projections (cylindrical, equidistant, three-plane and others), the ability to change the position of the panorama on a plane or sphere (depending on the projection), cropping and a save wizard in which you can select the format and size. In addition, in advanced mode, the ability to use masks and many other tools is available.

Key features and functions

creation of panoramic images in various projections;
the ability to create multi-row gigapixel panoramas;
three operating modes: simple, advanced and expert;
step by step panorama wizard in simple mode;
automatic arrangement of control points with the possibility of manual adjustment;
perspective, color, vignetting and exposure correction;
detection of moving objects, removal of "ghosts";
high speed of work;
the ability to use masks;
automatic use of camera data from EXIF;
possibility of batch processing of images;
Russified interface;
the possibility of free use of the program (GPL v2 license).

Special requirements

minimum 256 MB random access memory(for work with large projects it is desirable from 512 and above);
A processor with 2 or more cores is recommended.

What's new in this version?

2016.2.0 (01.11.2016)

added the ability to read image placement data from Papywizard XML files;
improved seamless gluing of images;
breakpoint editor now only loads editable images to increase speed;
optimized work with masks;
Fixed several issues with the Quick View window that could cause the program to freeze.
updated translations:
found errors fixed.

Every amateur photographer must have wondered at some point: how to make one from several pictures panoramic photo ? What is needed for this? Is it difficult? Read step by step instructions with which you can do panoramic photo (panorama) without tripod and without much difficulty.

Today I will tell you how to do it easily and simply.

Making a panorama is not easy, but very simple! Step-by-step instruction. Modern programs allow you to make a panorama from pictures taken with any camera, as long as the frames overlap each other. So that you have no doubts about the ability of your camera to take pictures suitable for making a panorama, for this photography lesson I took a phone camera.

I invite you to repeat all the steps of this instruction with me using these photos that you can

download from the link in the archive from my dropbox,

If you use your own shots, make sure that there is at least a quarter of the total space between shots, and it is better that the horizon does not "run away" between frames. In fact, a smaller overlay may suffice, but the best, as you know, is the enemy of the good, therefore it is better not to overdo it with overlapping.

To assemble the panorama, we will use the latest version of Hugin. At the time of this tutorial, the latest version is 2011.4.0. Hugin is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. All instructions below are suitable for the version for any OS.

Installing Hugin is easy, just download the installation package and follow the installer's instructions.

When opened, Hugin automatically creates new project. Select photos for the panorama by clicking the appropriate button.

You can add all the photos at once in one fell swoop.

Hugin defines the properties of the lens itself.

Click "Combine ..." and let's go to drink tea, especially if you do not have the most modern computer or a lot of high-resolution pictures.

As soon as Hugin merges the images, a panorama preview window will open.

For a better view of the result, turn off the grid by unchecking the box at the top of the window.

The panorama preview has several tabs with settings, some of which are of no interest to us at all due to the fact that Hugin has already done the main work on combining images, and the other part of the tabs can still be useful to us.

On the "Projection" tab, we have the ability to change the way images are projected and some other settings. For example, you can see what a panorama would look like if it was shot with a fisheye lens:

However, today our goal is not special effects, but a finished panorama, so we will choose an equidistant projection mode.

On the "Moving on the projection plane" tab, we have the opportunity to align the horizon on all frames, if suddenly it did not align automatically. We can also bend the horizon for more effect:

To return the horizon to its original, even state, press the "Align" button:

On the next Crop tab, click the Auto Crop button to automatically crop the black edges of the panorama.

If the result of automatic cropping does not suit you, you can drag the inner edge of the frame and crop it as you need, for example, if we plan to finish painting the sky and black fields do not bother us.