- Now that we've developed our raw files into images,
it's time to stitch 'em together.
- [Voiceover] We're ready to take our
bracketed source images and stitch them into a panorama.
So what you see here is my four sets
of bracketed images which make up our 360,
and also a fifth set, which is showing
the floor area where the tripod was.
So I've just moved a few feet away
and captured that area so we can add it in later.
First, we're going to start with our regular 360.
The way I like to work is to select them
by clicking the first one, Shift + clicking the last one,
and then dragging it right onto the PTGui icon.
And it loads it right away for me.
Straight away, we can click on Align Images,
and it recognizes the fact that we have bracketed photos.
If we didn't have bracketed photos,
we could choose this last option
to tell that it had detected them correctly.
If we had handheld the images,
we could choose this second option.
But we shot these images on a solid tripod,
and we want it to link the images together.
That means that it won't treat the bracketed shots
as individual shots, it will treat them as a set.
And all of the detail changes that we make later
will be applied to all of them.
And at the bottom, do we want to use
Exposure Fusion or True HDR, it calls it?
And I like to use Exposure Fusion for these interior scenes.
So I'll click OK.
Now it's gonna analyze the images and find exactly
how they fit together, add control points, et cetera.
And this is one of the parts where
the real power is coming through.
Because PTGui's been around for a long time,
it's really well developed.
And it's gonna handle our images really well,
but where the true power comes is that
when it isn't able to detect things correctly,
we have a great number of tools to fix those issues.
But let me first show you how good this can work for us
straight away by going to this Preview tab.
I'm gonna click on Preview and then choose
the Open it in the PTGui Viewer,
which comes together with PTGui Pro.
This is really just to illustrate that in many cases,
we don't need to use such powerful tools to fix problems.
We do, of course, many times.
But for professional work such as
real estate, we do want it to handle
everything as automatically as possible.
So it gives us not the best final image, of course,
this is a preview image, it's rather low-res,
but I can tell right away that
everything's gone together really well.
All the way up to the ceiling.
Down here, where our tripod is still
showing at this stage in our process.
But right off the bat, I don't see any glaring problems.
So we could literally go ahead
and render our panorama at this point,
just closing out that preview image,
since this type of scene
presents very few stitching problems.
The kind of challenges for this kind of scene
come from things being close by the camera.
But we did a really good job with our capture
with no parallax during that process,
so that doesn't matter to us now.
It also has a huge dynamic range,
but we also took care of that during capture.
And we'll also be putting the exposures
together in a later step.
But for the stitching, we're almost ready to go.
But let's just quickly talk about
some of these tabs that PTGui offers.
One of them is the Lens Settings tab,
which just confirms for us that it's
detecting the right kind of lens,
with the focal length and also the lens parameters.
But we don't need to really know
too much about that for this kind of process.
The panorama settings, also very simple here,
it has chosen correctly an equirectangular projection.
And you'll recall that that means the full
360 degree shot by 180 degrees up and down.
So that's good, we could change it
if we were doing something different,
such as cylindrical, which means that
you're not able to see all the way up and down.
And it does not have to be a 360 degree image either.
We want equirectangular.
The Crop tab, in my experience I don't find it
necessary to really change the crop.
But what it's doing here is making sure to ignore
those black areas that happen with the circular fisheye,
because some parts of the image
are not actually used in this case.
So you see this white line has chosen automatically
where that is, and I don't find that I need to change it.
But if you want to, or if you're setting up a template,
or if you find a problem, you just
click and drag it down a little bit so that
none of that black area is being used.
This kind of lens just has the black areas in the corners.
What you see here on the right and the left
is actually the end of the frame, so that,
these black areas inside the white line
before you see the details of the image
don't actually exist, that's not part of the captured image.
Let's move over here to Control Points,
because that's a really important
part of the stitching process.
Control points are kind of the heart of stitching,
because the computer of course can't really tell much about
the images the same way that we do,
so we have to place control points that say
this item of detail in this image is equal
to the same item in the other image,
and then it overlaps them correctly.
So here we can see a little bit of a illustration
of how the control points look, and they're getting
rather small, I think, on the screen now.
But when you compare the right side of one image
to the left side of the other image,
you can see how they're lining up together.
And we'll talk more about control points going forward,
but it's important to see how those work,
and the details of it'll come a little bit later.
The Optimizer tab can be very helpful
because the Optimizer, it's kind of a general term
that tells us how well the image is
really overlayed together based on the control points
that've been either chosen automatically by the software,
or if you've made changes to them, it'll also tell you
how the images go together based on that.
So if we click Run Optimizer, it already tells us
that it judges it being very good.
The initial stitching is already very good,
we don't really need to change those
control points in this particular project.
So we can accept the changes of the Optimizer,
and we're able to move on.
We're not using the Exposure HDR tab further,
because we've already chosen our basic settings earlier,
and we're going to do our further rendering
in an outside program called Photomatics Pro,
rather than using the built in HDR functions in PTGui.
Again, we're using all the strengths
of each of the applications, and the strength
of the stitching application is not
in rendering the dynamic range together.