PTStitcherNG 0.7b ================= New Features: (1) Seaming and blending options are extended. The accessible parameters and their defaults are tuned to resemble the PTGui-blender as closely as possible: The minimum pyramid level used for blending can now be selected (default: 3) which resembles the use of a feather tool. By default, the stitching seam is placed in the center of the overlap region. In previous releases this worked only up to 256 pixel wide overlaps, now seam placement is reliable also for larger overlaps. (2) A simple seam editing scheme is added: A mask image can be created displaying all seams between contributing source images. This mask image may be edited in any graphics program (Photoshop, Gimp, ...), and later used as input for the stitching process. The mask may be reused if the same input-image configuration is used (e.g. to hide parts of the panorama tripod head). The man-page has some more details. A tutorial article will be published later. (3) Support for output in Photoshop PSD and PSB (large document) format. See the documentation for details. (4) EXIF data are copied from first processed JPEG-image to output JPEG-image. (5) Source image location may now be specified as either fullpath or relative to scriptlocation. (6) Rotation in EXIF data is supported (+/-90 degrees, only JPEG-input). (7) Two new projections for display of large field-of-views are added: The multiple-rectilinear format which I presented 2 years ago here Usage will be explained in a separate documentation and tutorial. And the Panini format by Thomas Sharpless and Bruno Postle Scripting parameters are identical to the Hugin-version. (8) An experimental content dependent seam optimizer is available (only non-Cuda version). It optimizes the placement of the seams for two steps of a few hundred scanlines in advance, then takes one of those steps. This procedure is repeated until the image is processed. It is not as smart as the algorithms in Smartblend or Enblend which use global optimizations. Unfortunately, global optimizations are not feasible in PTStitcherNG since processing takes place in a streaming manner. As a consequence, early wrong decisions of the seam optimizer can not be corrected later and may result in desasters. (9) dcraw is included in the distribution to handle raw image formats. (10) Compatibility with PTGui-frontend improved: The #-imginactive-tag is honoured (i.e. images excluded in the "create panorama"-dialog of PTGui) and the blend-priority setting can be used to shift the seams (similar but not exactly by the same amount as PTGui). (11) To clean up the interface: Blending over zenith/nadir as introduced in 0.6 has caused some confusion. It is no longer default but has to be specified in the calling command (see man-page). PTStitcherNG 0.6b ================= New features: (1) Blending over zenith and nadir. This is implemented by creating cap images and inserting them at the end of the stitching process. It is transparently enabled when stitching spherical panos, and can be controlled by command line switches. (2) Inverse mode added, i.e. a panorama file can be supplied and all partial "source" images specified in the script are created. All sensible options are supported in reverse mode including all warp transformations, radial distortions and perspective transformations. There are numerous applications for this mode like creating cube faces, extracting sequences of images to be merged in motion images etc. Caution: read the warning in the docs before experimenting! (3) Viewpoint correction added (use PTGui-scriptsyntax). Changed features: (1) Choosing "TIFF_m" as output format now disables the blender.The output file consists of a multiframe image with one remapped frame per input image. The frames are tagged with their offset coordinates in the global panoramic image. (2) Maximum blend level is increased to 10, default is still 8. (3) sinc/lanczos interpolators for 6x6 and 8x8 kernels added (in addition to the existing 16x16 and 32x32 kernels). Bugfixes: - fix for negativ crops (caused black lines and bad blend). - sinc interpolators fixed on cuda platform, speed increase an all platforms. - radial distortion in inverse mode improved (more accurate). - black-line-at-wrap-joint bug fixed. PTStitcherNG 0.5b changes to 0.4b - versions for Windows 7 (64 & 32 bit, cuda & non-cuda binaries). The failure of the latest version 0.4b was due to a broken strdup implementation on this platform, which crashes, if memory allocated using strdup (or _strdup) is freed. Seems to be mingw-related. - implemented a new custom TIFF-writer to overcome the speed limit on seek-challenged platforms. Standard (non-layered) TIFF is now written as tiled image, which loads faster and as flat image in standard readers. Speed for gigapixel panorama creation has further increased, and is high now on all platforms. - negative crop-parameters are supported for both orientations (horizontal/vertical). - the logic for selecting BigTIFF vs normal TIFF output has been changed: It can now be forced by the script (add parameter "b1" to the TIFF specification like n"TIFF b1"). For standard (non-layered, non-deferred) TIFF-output, PTStitcherNG automatically selects BigTIFF, if the resulting image file size is too large for normal TIFF. - output can now be set to stdout (command line switch "-o -"). This forces image format to ppm overwriting any script settings, and enables option '-d' (deferred merging, to prevent seek operations in the the output stream). A pipe may thus be setup to convert the panorama to any format. - corrected errors: cpu-identification on startup, mixed dos/unix pathnames in wine - no Linux-version in this release althought Linux is the fastest platform for PTStitcherNG for a given hardware. Will be included again in later releases. - the release now contains all necessary installation files including the CUDA runtime but excluding the CUDA driver. Changes to 0.3b - added second Mac-version for older OS-releases (MacOS Tiger 10.4) - compiled using SSE2 flag to support older processors, no noticeable slowdown. - changed order of math-transformations for compatibility with libpano13 - added commandline option "-l num" to set pyramid level for blender (see manpage). - added commandline switch "-d" to force deferred-merging (see manpage). - bugfixes and many extensions in parser (width in o-line is handled correctly, JPEG-options can be set, global PTGui-"dummyimage" is parsed correctly); should now work with many PTGui-projectfiles as well as old PtStitcher-projects. - an extension is added to the outputname, if it has none. - The Windows version has been tested to work on XP. Vista and 7 require setting Win98-compatibility mode.