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John Spikowski wrote:
> 
> I have been able to feed cropped fish eye images (2) to PTOptimizer with
> control point selected with Pixel Picker and almost have an aligned spherical
> panorama image.
> 
> This takes 20-30 minutes on my 450mhz PC.
> 
> I would like to use the Photo Shop plug-in and align the fish eye images
> visually like I do in IPIX Builder.
> 
> Is this possible or am I asking too much of Helmut's tools?


There are two optimizers: one built into the Photoshop plug-in and
PTPicker, the other used in the standalone PTOptimizer program.
They are very different. The first one uses control points,
is fast and accurate, the second one is very slow, less accurate,
often fails, but needs no control points. The second one works only with 
images having large overlap.

I suggest to use the first optimizer, in fact I don't distribute
the second with the current Mac-PanoTools package anymore. With
PTPicker it is fast and accurate to align images by setting
a few control points. Results are often better than using the
ipix builder. I would guess you need less than 10min per pano,
including color/brightness corrections, logo insertion and 
other postprocessing.

Using the PC, it is more difficult since you don't have the 
UI to set control points. You have three options:
o Read control point coordinates via Photoshop
o Read control Points via flags and Panorama Tools plug-in
o Read control points via Sascha Kerschhofers PixelPicker
  Javascript (see 'Resources' at my website).
After setting control points (~5-10), you would run  the
optimizer built into the plug-in, and use the script
with PTStitcher. The Panorama Tools docs have one example.

I have no plans currently to port PTPicker to PCs, but
anybody who wants to try may have the sources. I really
should have written PTPicker in java.

If you want to do alignment manually, I suggest to use
the same script for all your images (eg the coolpix
script from my site, or an optimized version of it)
and generate Photoshop multilayer files by default
(option 'PSD_mask'). Then you can move and align the 
layers in Photoshop.

Helmut Dersch

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