cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Cannot adjust seam with PhotoStitch

Macman44
Apprentice

I am using PhotoStitch 3.2.5.26 with my Mac (OS 10.11) for the first time, to connect together pictures taken with my PowerShot SX150 iS.  The program was easy to use, and in general has done a good job, but there is one glitch that I can't seem to find a way to get around.

 

A pair of adjacent photos appear to have insufficient overlap for the software to work right - there is some overlap however.  When the pictures are stitched together, about a quarter of the left-hand picture is cut off, resulting in a disconnect in the final result.  If I go to the Amend Merge tool and use it, I get a message that the overlap area is too small or too large, whichever option I choose.

 

There is about 5% overlap between the two frames, so theoretically they could merge.  I just can't find a way within PhotoStitch to do it.  Can anybody suggest a method or workaround?

 

Thanks,

Paul.

9 REPLIES 9

Waddizzle
Legend
Legend

"There is about 5% overlap between the two frames, so theoretically they could merge."

 

5%?  You're joking, right?  Theoretically, you could do it by hand, too.  You will get the best results when images overlap by 1/3.  If the software is telling you that it cannot automatically resolve the overlap, then accept it.  It's not recognizing anything.

--------------------------------------------------------
"The right mouse button is your friend."


@Waddizzle wrote:

"There is about 5% overlap between the two frames, so theoretically they could merge."

 

5%?  You're joking, right?  Theoretically, you could do it by hand, too.  You will get the best results when images overlap by 1/3.  If the software is telling you that it cannot automatically resolve the overlap, then accept it.  It's not recognizing anything.


I know this is an old reply, but I have the same problem and if I can see the overlap, why can't Photostitch just accept where I put the overlapping images and merge them there. If I'd known I needed closer to 30% before trying this then I would have made sure to overlap them by that much in the viewfinder when taking the pics, but I'm not able to do another 12 hour round trip just to overlap one frame by 30% when 5% should have been enough. You could have offered a more useful response than "You're joking right?"

Because it can't. One problem with the 5% overlap is that distortion can make it impossible to match the images.

When Photostitch couldn't connect the images with 5% overlap, I went to Photoshop Elements, which did a very good job.  Maybe there is a very small amount of distortion at the joins, but I can't see it.


@Macman44 wrote:

When Photostitch couldn't connect the images with 5% overlap, I went to Photoshop Elements, which did a very good job.  Maybe there is a very small amount of distortion at the joins, but I can't see it.


Even allowing me to manually set the overlap and just blending the overlap would produce less distortion at the seam than the auto function does. However, in the end I used Hugin Panorama Editor, although it isn't the most user friendly programme, it is free and it was able to find enough common points in the edges of all the photos to do a great job of joining them together. I was also able to get the two troublesome photos to stitch together with ICE but it was unable to cope with the uneven overlaps between these two and the other photos in the Panorama as it seems to need all the overlaps to be close to the same amount..


@kvbarkley wrote:

Because it can't. One problem with the 5% overlap is that distortion can make it impossible to match the images.


Not only distortion, but images can get soft, and slightly out of focus, at the edges with many lenses.

--------------------------------------------------------
"The right mouse button is your friend."

 


@kvbarkley

 wrote:

Because it can't.


 

It can't because it won't even try looking for matching elements near the edges of the images, but then it finds what it thinks are matching elements further into the image, and ends up producing a far more distorted image with definite misalignments.  It is obviously possible since Hugin managed it without obvious distortions or alignment errors, at least not without zooming in so close that there's no point in having a Panorama, for my purposes.

 

So in future I guess I'll have to remember to take many more shots with more overlap, or just perservere with Hugin. 

 

It would be nice however if the programme doesn't want to automatically or semi manually merge images that close to the edges then it could warn me about potential distortions near the seams but allow me to decide if I can accept that compromise. Hugin and ICE CAN do it , just saying.  I don't do enough photo editing to justify paying for photoshop, I'd rather be saving for a new lens or camera body but it apparently CAN do it too.

AFAIK, photostitch has not been updated in over 10 years.

Sorry, I was wrong, looks like it was updated 4 years ago:

https://canon-utilities-photostitch.en.lo4d.com/

Announcements