Photo Stitching

Every now and then I find myself in a situation where the focal length of my lens is not wide enough to capture my desired field of view.  While I could certainly whip out my iPhone and use the camera's Landscape feature (which does a pretty nice job in my opinion), there are times when I prefer to create a higher resolution final image, to have the flexibility to adjust shadows/highlight, or to generate a HDR landscape.  In those situations, I take multiple overlapping photos and stitch them together using a desktop application on my iMac.

While there are many well-written articles about to compose your images or adjust your camera settings prior to stitching, in this post I will focus on the post-processing aspect and review 2 applications that have been around for many years: PTGui and DoubleTake.

PTGui. Despite the rather unattractive name of this app (it stands for Panorama Tools Graphical User Interface), I feel like it is excels in many categories.  In particular, it does a very good job of automatically detecting overlapping borders, even in situations where I shoot multiple rows of images.  Additionally, it tends to generate a sufficient number of control points (these are pixels of the overlapping photos that are used as a reference to calculate how photos need to be warped upon stitching) and enables the user to modify or add additional control points to optimize the output.  Finally, when previewing the resultant stitched image, there are multiple presets as well as options to modify the perspective so that you can fine tune the look and feel.

DoubleTake.  While PTGui has more features and possibly has a slightly steeper learning curve, DoubleTake seems to have been created with simplicity in mind.  However, its simplicity is achieved at the expense of capabilities and quality.  For example, while DoubleTake tends to perform well when stitching a single row of overlapping photos, it fails to stitch multiple rows of photos, and I could not figure out how to do it manually either.  If you can get the images to stitch, you can use some alignment features, but most of it feels pretty "automatic" as you can align entire images, but there do not appear to be options to fine-tune the stitching.

There are other photo stitching applications, but these are the only 2 that I have experience with.  I've used PTGui for nearly a decade now, and it has performed exceptionally well for just about every batch of photos I've thrown its way.  While I had evaluated DoubleTake when I first started using PTGui, I thought I'd give it another try to see if it would supplant my current photo stitching workflow, as I assumed the app's feature set would have continued evolving and improving.  However, DoubleTake didn't even come close.  PTGui has served me well, and I'm sticking to it for now.