The Live Photo Gallery team oughta talk to the Image Composite Editor team

I haven't tried the wave 3 beta of Live Photo Gallery, so this might have been improved upon already, but I've been playing with Microsoft Research's Image Composite Editor, and it turns out that the panoramic stitching it does is often even better than that in WLPG.

I've been stitching my holiday snaps together with Live Photo Gallery, and despite myself being a very poor photographer and generally too impatient to set proper lighting settings and stuff, it got some pretty good results. Today I ran the same picture's through ICE, and I noticed that it was able to handle the various dynamic ranges and lighting conditions much, much better than WLPG. Compare:



(Dead Indian Pass in WLPG and ICE, respectively. Notice the bands of light in the left half of the top picture)



(Again, WLPG on top and ICE on the bottom. Notice the various tones of blue in the sky on the top image.)


A tricky one, with the lower part (being in the shade) coming out very dark, but having a clear sky and brightly lit Devil's Tower in the top part. WLPG added a weird bright haze in the middle and in general lit up the picture, ICE managed to keep the whole range of dark versus light.

I did notice that ICE threw up more weird artifact (like roads suddenly splitting and shifted vertically half a centimeter or so), but overall, I'm really impressed with how it managed to make the brightness of the composites much more uniform than WLPG.

By the way, ICE's auto crop feature (where it sets the cropping rectangle to the largest possible rectangle that doesn't include transparent bits) is ideal. Would love to see that in WLPG.

What Adobe does is to analyse the overlap of two pictures and choose which part should be taken from which picture. ICE could really need this kind of smart way of analysing contrasting objects to create the illusion of a seamless panorama. You notice ICE failing when taking panorama pictures where people are walking by.

Bas, also try to see if your camera keeps its light and focus setting by keeping the button half-pressed between pictures. This will illiminate the need to adjust for light differences.

Here's one of my longest stitches to date, 34799 x 2020  Pixels (70.29 MPixels) :

PeterF said:

What Adobe does is to analyse the overlap of two pictures and choose which part should be taken from which picture. ICE could really need this kind of smart way of analysing contrasting objects to create the illusion of a seamless panorama. You notice ICE failing when taking panorama pictures where people are walking by.

Bas, also try to see if your camera keeps its light and focus setting by keeping the button half-pressed between pictures. This will illiminate the need to adjust for light differences.

Here's one of my longest stitches to date, 34799 x 2020  Pixels (70.29 MPixels) :

Bas, also try to see if your camera keeps its light and focus setting by keeping the button half-pressed between pictures. This will illiminate the need to adjust for light differences.

I know that, I often target it at a mountain with the half-press to get it properly lit, and then take a shot of the sky (otherwise I'd get a way too bright picture), but as I said, I often just forget about that on account of being too impatient.

That stitch you did was pretty amazing. How did you move the camera, in the same plane or did you rotate it? The middle of my pictures was taken on a mountain overlook, but as you can see, it looks really curved. Incidentally, that makes it look even better in HD View (when you get to 'look around' in it), but it looks kinda weird as a 2D image. I notice your image is nice and straight.

Haven't tried ICE on pictures where people are walking around, but I did give that a shot with WLPG, and that came out fine:



This was composited from roughly nine shots, with people walking around and everything. The steam kept moving around, too. I'll give this a shot in ICE to see what it does.

But yeah, it's not so much the stitching that impresses me in ICE, but the way it manages to get the lighting uniform across all pictures it  stitches.

Bas said:

PeterF said:

*snip*

I know that, I often target it at a mountain with the half-press to get it properly lit, and then take a shot of the sky (otherwise I'd get a way too bright picture), but as I said, I often just forget about that on account of being too impatient.

That stitch you did was pretty amazing. How did you move the camera, in the same plane or did you rotate it? The middle of my pictures was taken on a mountain overlook, but as you can see, it looks really curved. Incidentally, that makes it look even better in HD View (when you get to 'look around' in it), but it looks kinda weird as a 2D image. I notice your image is nice and straight.

Haven't tried ICE on pictures where people are walking around, but I did give that a shot with WLPG, and that came out fine:



This was composited from roughly nine shots, with people walking around and everything. The steam kept moving around, too. I'll give this a shot in ICE to see what it does.

But yeah, it's not so much the stitching that impresses me in ICE, but the way it manages to get the lighting uniform across all pictures it  stitches.

How did you move the camera, in the same plane or did you rotate it?

The photos were taken from Alcatraz and I rotated, you can see that from the perspective of the parallel roads of the downtown area. They are 17 pictures.

I've made another panorama where I zoomed more on the skyline, consisting of 41 pictures. However because they were also all shot by hand, I had to do some filling in/editing of sky and water to get a decent crop. It is 54937 x 2823  Pixels (155.09 MPixels) and had it hanging in an entire corridor at work to show off a wide format printer's color capabilities we are developing. You notice it's not as wide angle as the other one, but it has more detail on the buildings.

PeterF said:

Bas said:

*snip*

How did you move the camera, in the same plane or did you rotate it?

The photos were taken from Alcatraz and I rotated, you can see that from the perspective of the parallel roads of the downtown area. They are 17 pictures.

I've made another panorama where I zoomed more on the skyline, consisting of 41 pictures. However because they were also all shot by hand, I had to do some filling in/editing of sky and water to get a decent crop. It is 54937 x 2823  Pixels (155.09 MPixels) and had it hanging in an entire corridor at work to show off a wide format printer's color capabilities we are developing. You notice it's not as wide angle as the other one, but it has more detail on the buildings.

C'mon guys! These panoramas are crying out for the DeepZoom experience!

My camera has a stitch mode. When I use that it shows the previous picture to the right or left of the display so you can make sure you don't leave gaps, and it fixes the lighting settings so they are all the same.

Sven Groot said:

My camera has a stitch mode. When I use that it shows the previous picture to the right or left of the display so you can make sure you don't leave gaps, and it fixes the lighting settings so they are all the same.

I use the stitch mode to guide me all the time. it also gives you just the right amount of overlap.

Photoshop HAD a very bad stitcher up until CS3 when they finally got a very good one so that's what I use now but I was quite impressed with WLPG's panorama maker. I've never even heard of Image Composite Editor.

The key to getting good panoramas is to always keep on the same plane and make sure that they don't vary wildly in contrast.
I've found that making 2 or 3 photo stitches is more useful than using a wide angle lens when you're shooting landscapes.

Minh said:

PeterF said:

*snip*

C'mon guys! These panoramas are crying out for the DeepZoom experience!

I tried... while it works great on my desktop, I can't seem to get anything other than blackness if I upload the files to a webserver. I don't know if you're supposed to do anything else besides uploading the files that ICE spits out, by the way, so that might be the problem.

Dead Indian Pass
Midway Geyser Basin

dentaku said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

I use the stitch mode to guide me all the time. it also gives you just the right amount of overlap.

Photoshop HAD a very bad stitcher up until CS3 when they finally got a very good one so that's what I use now but I was quite impressed with WLPG's panorama maker. I've never even heard of Image Composite Editor.

The key to getting good panoramas is to always keep on the same plane and make sure that they don't vary wildly in contrast.
I've found that making 2 or 3 photo stitches is more useful than using a wide angle lens when you're shooting landscapes.

You should try kolor autopano, it's much better than WLPG at matching differences in exposure.

PerfectPhase said:

dentaku said:

*snip*

You should try kolor autopano, it's much better than WLPG at matching differences in exposure.

Photoshop seems to do a  good job at matching exposure too but that looks like nice Software. I never knew about that one either.

Bas said:

PeterF said:

*snip*

I know that, I often target it at a mountain with the half-press to get it properly lit, and then take a shot of the sky (otherwise I'd get a way too bright picture), but as I said, I often just forget about that on account of being too impatient.

That stitch you did was pretty amazing. How did you move the camera, in the same plane or did you rotate it? The middle of my pictures was taken on a mountain overlook, but as you can see, it looks really curved. Incidentally, that makes it look even better in HD View (when you get to 'look around' in it), but it looks kinda weird as a 2D image. I notice your image is nice and straight.

Haven't tried ICE on pictures where people are walking around, but I did give that a shot with WLPG, and that came out fine:



This was composited from roughly nine shots, with people walking around and everything. The steam kept moving around, too. I'll give this a shot in ICE to see what it does.

But yeah, it's not so much the stitching that impresses me in ICE, but the way it manages to get the lighting uniform across all pictures it  stitches.

You went to Yellowstone National Park?

Bass said:

Bas said:

*snip*

You went to Yellowstone National Park?

Pretty much all over Wyoming, but yeah, the best shots are from Yellowstone.

Yes, if ICE can do better job it may be implemented in WLPG beta.
In WLPG beta it gives an entry point for using ICE. This option is provided in the 'Extras' Menu of WLPG.

Btw, Have you tried using 'Create Panoramic Photos....' option to Create your Clone? Try it now,  its total Fun.

Get photographed with your clone using Windows Live Photo Gallery

Wow, both MS product, and so much difference. Hope the final version of WLPG is updated with better stiching.

Bas said:

Minh said:

*snip*

I tried... while it works great on my desktop, I can't seem to get anything other than blackness if I upload the files to a webserver. I don't know if you're supposed to do anything else besides uploading the files that ICE spits out, by the way, so that might be the problem.

Dead Indian Pass
Midway Geyser Basin

I just use the DeepZoom composer & upload to Live.com... There's an option to deploy locally, too, IIRC... then you can copy that deployment wherever

Thanks for posting these great examples.  I wanted to let you know that the Windows Live Photo Gallery team and Microsoft Research (creators of ICE) talk all of the time.  We collaborated on the first version of WLPG stitching.  We are aware of the issue that you point out and as you have noticed we have worked hard since last year to improve on the exposure blending.  The WLPG team will have more to say about this when they ship next month.

PeterF said:

What Adobe does is to analyse the overlap of two pictures and choose which part should be taken from which picture. ICE could really need this kind of smart way of analysing contrasting objects to create the illusion of a seamless panorama. You notice ICE failing when taking panorama pictures where people are walking by.

Bas, also try to see if your camera keeps its light and focus setting by keeping the button half-pressed between pictures. This will illiminate the need to adjust for light differences.

Here's one of my longest stitches to date, 34799 x 2020  Pixels (70.29 MPixels) :

> You notice ICE failing when taking panorama pictures where people are walking by

I don't think that this is correct.  You may have run into a failure case but in general we do as well if not better than CS3/CS4 on this.  I feel pretty confident about saying this, because the technique that both products use was born out of a collaboration between Microsoft Research and University of Washington.  You can read more about that on my blog: http://hdview.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1AD33AA162CE96C2!506.entry 

mattuyttendaele said:

PeterF said:

*snip*

> You notice ICE failing when taking panorama pictures where people are walking by

I don't think that this is correct.  You may have run into a failure case but in general we do as well if not better than CS3/CS4 on this.  I feel pretty confident about saying this, because the technique that both products use was born out of a collaboration between Microsoft Research and University of Washington.  You can read more about that on my blog: http://hdview.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1AD33AA162CE96C2!506.entry 

Hi Matt

I did notice that it happens primarily in cases where you didn't rotate around the camera axis, so hand shot instead of on a tripod.
I've done some exports to HD View.
You can see them on http://peterf.mine.nu/panorama

Can't wait to ssee the many improvements Research is still working on.

Too bad ICE doesn't allow you to create a panorama with zoomed in pictures, so with a tool like HD View you could zoom in to some portions of the picture and have them with better detail , like with Photosynth. Also one day I hope to see an easy application where you can truefully walk through a recreated 3d environment based on your pictures, so like Photosynth but with all pictures visible.