Is it possible to photo stitch in Canon Digital Photo Professional?

[snowshine]

Hello,
I wish to create a Pano [Have taken 6 RAW images in Canon 40D] by photo stitching.

The 2 questions, if I may ask:

1. Can I do photo stitching in Canon's DPP?

And

2. Such created - stitched photo [RAW] be taken into the Mac' photo processing program "Aperture" to do final tweak ?

Regards

[Geoff F]

From what I can remember of DPP, I would say no.

To create panoramas you either need a specialist programme or software which can work with a number of layers. Create a new blank background to a suitable size then add each shot on a separate layer and move to match.

And from what little I know of the various Photo Stitch software options; they will not operate in RAW. You will have to convert to Tiff or Jpeg with DPP then use these images to create the panorama.

But someone who does more of this type of processing may be able to offer more detailed advice.

[carregwen]

I don't think you can, unless the latest version does it - which would surprise me. Photoshop does it in CS versions (quite well, actually), and as Geoff said, there are several packages that will do it.

[delboy]

Did you get the Software CD with your 40D ? If so there is a Canon programme included called PhotoStitch. As far as I am aware it will not handle Raw files which seems strange as it is a Canon programme.
I have not used this programme, as I use Photoshop Elements 8 which includes a Panorama or stitching programme which handles Raw files and does a very good job.

Delboy

[David]

Hi Delboy - Canon's Digital Photo Professional software does not of itself do photo-stitching. However, as you sa,y the CD that comes with the camera does contain a photo-stitch application. This works reasonably well, but it's probably not in the same league as dedicated third party software. There is an immesely powerful suite of programs from the Hugin group, http://hugin.sourceforge.net , or better Google Hugin to get to their site, that allows, in their view, every conceivable way of stitching things together. I've used it, although it takes some effort to understand, and it does appear very good.

Cheers

David

[revi]

I don't know the canon software, so I can't help there. I use the Hugin software (with all the associated programs) under linux, but it's also available for Windows and Mac. This program uses Tiff, jpeg or PNG inputs (and perhaps others? No RAW though).

I'm not sure you can actually get a good stitch by using layers and doing a manual alignment: there's a need to correct distortions and colour/luminosity differences between images, and specialised programs take care of that.
(Note that even with top of the line glass parts of the images will have to be deformed to make them match up, especially with wide-angle shots)

Remco

[delboy]

Hi David and Remco,

Thanks for the info on Hugin software. I really don't have a need for this type of software but I will have a go at it to see what it can do, also it is a free download which suits my Scottish ancestory.

On a different topic, I find with this digital photography there is so much info out there, it is hard at times to find the time to read and absorb all the information, and sometimes feel the days of sloshing a bit of paper in a developing dish were a lot simpler.

Delboy.

[arith]

The Hugin is very interesting software, however I couldn't get it to stitch my Cambridge Emmanuel College interior although PSE did a half decent job. My wide angle lens is extremely long with 19 elements and I suspect suffers from parallax. I certainly can't kart around a massive ninja head so that's about it for pano's unless I change to my prime.

[David]

Steve - I've had failures with Hugin as well and I'm never sure whether it's me making a mess of something or a problem in the software. There's never enough time to sort these things out - just like recent discussions re Raw Therapy and so on. I probably don't do enough pano work to justify limited time resources.

David

[revi]

I've had problems as well in some cases. Often, it helped to manually set the control points, as the automatic selection can get confused when there are repeating structures in the image (like modern buildings).

Also, the newest version seems to have some nice extra possibilities (not used it yet, I'll have to compile it first, the distribution is lagging behind as usual )

Remco

[timo2]

At one point I used Hugin (because it was free) but I got fed up with errors that either needed a lot of PP work to fix or some totally bizarre results that couldn’t be fixed at all.

I ended up buying PGTui… ok so it’s not free, but its reliable and has better tools to assist in producing perfect results. Even panos where there are featureless frames (clear blue sky springs to mind) with nothing the control point editor can lock onto can – by using templates - be integrated for a perfectly rendered result.