PTGui Pro

9.1.3

PTGui is panoramic stitching software.

User Rating:

Not rated yet
Version:

9.1.3
Publisher:

New House Internet Services B.V.
Date added:

Jan 17, 2012
Operating systems:

Windows
File size:

12.29 MB
File name:

PTGui_Pro_9.1.3_trial_Setup.exe
Total downloads:

158
License:

Shareware ($209)
User reviews:

Write your review
Video review:

Not available
Share it:

To link this page, insert the following HTML code to your page:

Before you download: Run a free scan for PC errors

Download Now (12.29 Mb)

Software Description

PTGui is panoramic stitching software for Windows and Mac OSX. Originally developed as a Graphical User Interface for Panorama Tools (hence the name), PTGui now is a full featured photo stitching application.PTGui stitches most panoramas fully automatically, but at the same time provides full manual control over every single parameter.

Key features:

- PTGui can stitch multiple rows of images

- Create 360 degree cylindrical panoramas, 'flat' partial panoramas and even spherical 360x180 degree panoramas

- No need to keep the camera level: PTGui can stitch rotated and tilted images

- Virtually unlimited output size: create Gigapixel panoramas from hundreds of images!

- Layered output allows full control over the final stitched result

- PTGui stitches most panoramas fully automatically, but at the same time provides full manual control over every single parameter. This enables stitching of 'difficult' scenes, where other programs fail.

- Full 16 bit workflow for best image quality

When creating a panorama from multiple photos, moving objects can cause stitching problems. For example a person walking around the scene may appear in the panorama twice, or may even be cut in half by the seam between two overlapping images. Furthermore, often you will have your tripod or your feet visible in the nadir shot of a spherical panorama.

PTGui Pro includes a new masking tool which can be used to prevent these problems. By masking you can tell the blender precisely which part of the images should or should not be visible in the blended panorama.

An important limitation in photography is dynamic range: on a sunny day, the contrast between objects in the shadow and sunlit objects is often too high to be captured by a camera in a single photograph. In a long exposure, shadow details will be visible, but bright areas in the image, such as the sky, will be overexposed, often completely white. By shortening the exposure time, bright areas will be exposed properly, but darker objects will turn completely black, or drown in the image noise. This limitation is apparent in particular in panoramic photography, since a panorama captures a wider scene and is more likely to contain both highlights and shadows.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography attempts to overcome this limitation, by combining multiple differently exposed photographs of the same scene (so called 'bracketed' exposures) into a single image. Such a combined image has a higher dynamic range, and is typically stored in a 32 bit per channel image file (regular jpeg files have only 8 bits). Since the contrast of a computer monitor and paper ink is limited as well, HDR images are tone mapped before display. Tone mapping makes local brightness adjustments to the image, to reduce the dynamic range such that it becomes suitable for display or print. For more information about HDR and tone mapping, see Wikipedia: HDR and Tone mapping.

Another approach to create a displayable image of a scene with a high dynamic range is called Exposure Fusion. This process is similar to HDR imaging, but it directly creates the tone mapped image from the bracketed exposures, skipping the step of generating the actual high dynamic range image. If one is only interested in the final tone mapped image, exposure fusion is the simpler alternative to true HDR imaging.

PTGui Pro provides extensive support for HDR imaging:

- Stitching bracketed exposures into an HDR panorama

- Stitching HDR source images into an HDR panorama

- Built in tone mapper, to create displayable images from an HDR panorama

- Exposure fusion of bracketed exposures straight into a tone mapped panorama

- Supports the following HDR file formats: 32 bit floating point TIFF, 32 bit PSD and PSB (for output only), OpenEXR (.exr) and Radiance (.hdr)

Photographing for HDR is done by taking several images of the same subject, varying the exposure. This is called 'bracketing'. The bracketed images are combined to HDR by taking only the properly exposed parts of each image.

In a camera there are three parameters controlling the amount of light captured: the exposure time, the aperture (or 'f-number') and the sensitivity (or 'iso value'). Varying the aperture does not only change the amount of light captured, but also changes the depth of field. Similarly, varying the sensitivity (iso) also changes the amount of noise in the images, and the camera's noise reduction algorithm may behave differently. Therefore, ideally the only parameter that should be varied is the exposure time.

When stitching HDR panoramas in PTGui Pro, there is another requirement: for every exposure time, the whole panorama should be covered. Internally, PTGui Pro groups the source images by exposure and creates a panorama for each group of identically exposed images. Finally, these blended panoramas (called 'blend planes' in PTGui Pro) are merged into an HDR image. If a certain exposure time would be used for only one image, PTGui Pro would consider that single image to be a full blend plane. That single image would be HDR merged with a full panorama from another blend plane, resulting in ugly artefacts since the blend planes do not fully overlap.

Also, PTGui Pro will try to find out whether the source images are bracketed exposures, by looking for a repeating sequence in the exposure values. The exposure times for sets of 3 bracketed images could look like 1/100, 1/25, 1/400, 1/100, 1/25, 1/400, (etc).

So every image should be taken at the same set of exposures, and preferably in the same order. Most SLR cameras have an automatic bracketing function, which makes this easy. When auto bracketing is enabled, multiple images are taken in sequence, with varying exposure times. It is important to set the camera to Manual ('M') mode: in any other mode, the automatic exposure function would adjust the exposure times between shots, and the part of the scene with the sun in it would be taken at a different set of exposure times from the darker parts of the panorama. And the nice thing about HDR is that you don't have to worry much about 'proper' exposure, since bracketing ensures that everything will be exposed properly anyway!

You do need to find out which aperture and which range of exposure times to use in M mode. This can be done by temporarily switching to Av mode; choose an aperture and look at the exposure times your camera chooses when you point it at the highlights and the shadows in the scene. Copy the same aperture setting to the M mode, and choose an exposure time somewhere inbetween the indicated values for the highlights and shadows.

Unfortunately many digital compact cameras lack the M mode. This makes it nearly impossible to properly photograph HDR panoramas with a compact camera; you will probably need an SLR camera.

As with any (non HDR) panorama, don't forget to lock the camera's white balance!

A tripod is recommended, but not required. If the images were taken from a tripod, PTGui can 'link' the images, which causes the images in each bracketed set to be overlaid exactly. If the images were taken hand held however, the link feature should be disabled, and PTGui will attempt to align the images within each bracketed set as well.

One of the more advanced features in PTGui Pro is viewpoint correction. Viewpoint correction allows one to use different camera viewpoints in the same panorama, provided that the relevant part of the images is approximately flat. It is particularly useful when including a handheld nadir image in a panorama taken from a tripod.

Viewpoint correction is included in PTGui Pro only; the regular version of PTGui does not include this feature.

When photographing panoramas, rule number one is to shoot all images from exactly the same viewpoint. More specifically the camera should be rotated around the 'no parallax point' (the optical center of the camera/lens). Otherwise, parallax errors will occur.

Soft-Go is not responsible for the content of PTGui Pro publisher's description. We encourage you to determine whether this product or your intended use is legal. We do not encourage or condone the use of any software in violation of applicable laws.

Any form of support or technical problems regarding PTGui Pro must be addressed to its developer/publisher. Please be aware that we do NOT provide PTGui Pro cracks, serial numbers, registration codes or any forms of pirated software downloads.

Screenshot

Download Note

PTGui Pro is periodically updated by our editors team but sometimes you may find out that software informations are outdated, please note that the publisher of PTGui Pro can update the software without notifying us. Current version of PTGui Pro is 9.1.3.

Note: Soft-Go doesn't provide any form of technical support regarding PTGui Pro, however, you may find answer to your problem by reading user reviews or directly contacting New House Internet Services B.V. which's the publisher/developer of this software.