In August 2009 I followed up a suggestion on a forum to try out
Arcsoft Panorama Maker 5 Pro (there's no non-Pro version). He already
uses hugin, and there's a free trial version, so I gave it a try. The following is
currently an excerpt from my diary; I may update it
later.
I should point out that I have very strong objections to the limitations imposed by
“modern” GUI-based software, which make things much more difficult than they
should be. Almost nobody else seems to have these problems, which I can only attribute to
the assumption that they've never found an easier way. Many of my objections to Panorama
Maker 5 Pro apply equally well to other GUI-based software that wants you to think
the way it does.
Today I tested Panorama
Maker 5 Pro. It lived up to my fears. On startup, it automatically changed
directory to ~/Pictures, showing lots of icons for files which had been deleted, but
for which I had forgotten to remove the second (shadow?) file that Apple insists on putting
in the directory. The only choice I was give was to “Open Panorama”, which
suggests to me that there should already been an existing panorama. It showed the usual
too-small window with truncated file names, in the directory ~/Pictures. Tried
selecting “New Folder”,
but that really tried to create a new directory, or so it seemed. It put the
“folder”, with an absolute path name, in what must have been the current
directory. Clearly the directory name is wrong:
Clearly they don't want you to just specify the name of the directory you want: you have to
search for it, directory node for directory node. Did that and got this display:
That shows 26 of the 1630 entries in the directory Photos, conveniently truncating
some of the names. About the best thing that I can say about this is that they are
sorted—still better than the pain I had with Facebooklast month, where I had
to navigate the same directory tree unsorted.
OK, these programs must have some way of accessing files without going to all this pain.
Clearly I need help. And, of course, there's a Help tag at the top of the screen. I
clicked on it and was taken to the middle of the help text. After going to Home,
discovered that there's no tutorial (or it's so well hidden that I didn't find it). And the
description is horribly fragmented (probably intended for the tiny windows that GUI developers seem
to love), so I was continually changing page, not helped by the fact that the contents were
often barely related to the title. For example:
That again does into another window telling me how to select “Folders”,
“Favorite Folders”, Calendars, Activity History and Tags—all sorts of
things, just no files. But I don't want to “browse my system”! I just want
to select the files I want (they're called verandah-1.jpeg
to verandah-5.jpeg, so the wild card verandah-?.jpeg will select them all).
Why do I have to go through this rigmarole? It's also interesting to note that the
directory browser dhows only a subset of the entries in the directories: symlinked
directories, notably ~/Photos, are missing, so I couldn't even access my photos.
As we'll see, it does accept symlinked files. I suspect that this omission is due
to the lack of understanding of file systems which seems typical of the GUI generation.
Finally selected a file, and was immediately transported to this window:
The text is written in black on dark grey to make it easier to read, and there's no way to
return to the Browser window. In fact, I couldn't find any way to do anything useful. It
seems that the different shades of grey at top and bottom indicate whether you can select
the buttons or not, but the colours are so unusual that I'm sure I'm not the only person
who has difficulty deciding which are selectable and which are not. So I stopped the
“Application”.
For what it's worth, this problem isn't unique to Panorama Maker 5 Pro: hugin has it too, and so, it seems, do all
the “user friendly” GUI programs out there. It's one of the reasons why I avoid
using them. How do you fix this problem? I don't know how in this horrible impoverished
GUI world, so I used real tools, the way I did for hugin. I created a new
directory, ~/panorama, and linked in the files that I wanted:
=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~ 1 -> mkdir panorama === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~ 2 -> cd panorama === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~/panorama 3 -> ln -s ~/Photos/20090815/verandah-?.jpeg . === grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp4) ~/panorama 4 -> l total 10
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 2187855 Aug 15 13:43 verandah-1.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 2156420 Aug 15 13:43 verandah-2.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 2072975 Aug 15 13:44 verandah-3.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 1943281 Aug 15 13:44 verandah-4.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 2 grog 1001 1776191 Aug 15 13:44 verandah-5.jpeg
Then I restarted Panorama Maker 5 Pro, which promptly forgot any reference to a
directory and went back to the ~/Pictures directory. Fortunately that's right next
to the ~/panorama directory, so I was able to select it directly. It came up without
a listing, just thumbnails of the (symlinked) images in the directory:
It's a good thing I didn't have more files in the directory; apart from the difficulty of
navigating potentially thousands of files, it takes for ever. I found another
directory, ~/foo, with over 4000 entries, all symlinks to files on dereel.
Clearly this was some test I did a while ago. Selecting this directory takes several
minutes, all the time maxing out my puny CPU and displaying the reassuring text
“Ready” at bottom left. When, after 2½ minutes of CPU time and much more
elapsed time, it completed, it displayed photo thumbnails in what proves to be chronological
(and not reverse chronological!) order:
Look at the scroll bar on the right to get an idea of how much you need to look through.
Still, this is looking more promising. Back to the ~/panorama directory, it had
already selected the box “Auto-Select by Group”, so all I needed to do was to
press “Next” at bottom right. Nothing happened.
That's fairly typical for Apple: they love to do things without showing that they're doing
them. Presumably the Microsoft hourglass or the Apple twirling wheel are too negative. But
after a while I realised that this thing was really not doing anything. Messed around and
discovered that I first had to select one of the photos; then they all developed a tick box,
along with a red frame round the image I had selected:
Then I pressed “Next”, and it went off and did its thing, surprisingly quickly,
and produced an image which looked good. I told it to save the image to the
file q.jpeg. It went away, apparently did something, but there was no q.jpeg
in the directory. In fact, there was no q.jpeg anywhere. It had gone and save the
file as ../Pictures/q.jpeg.JPG!
On the other hand, the results were really quite good. The result had a single obvious
discontinuity in the top middle, but on the whole it looked pretty good. It didn't have the
duplicate cat, though that might be more luck than anything:
The poor quality of the Arcsoft image isn't the fault of Arcsoft: this is a demonstration
version, and it limits the size of the saved panorama to (in this case) 1678 x 583, while
the hugin panorama is 4522 x 1481. I see no reason to believe that the image quality
of the paid version of Arcsoft would be worse than that of hugin. Apart from that,
it wasn't quite as good as my manually created hugin image, though that's not a fair
comparison. A better comparison would be an automatically generated hugin panorama.
Went out and did that, and hugin showed itself from its worst side:
So what I ended up was an only partially automatically generated hugin panorama.
Here the Panorama Maker 5 Pro image left, the “automatically”
generated hugin image in the middle, and the manually generated hugin image at
the right.
Like hugin, Arcsoft loses the EXIF information; I still need to run exiftool
to copy that across. In summary, Arcsoft seems to do at least as well
as hugin:
It's much faster. It runs faster on my old Apple than hugin does on my new
AMD Phenom based machine.
The verticals at the edge of the image are vertical. With hugin they're usually
angled. Possibly there's a way to fix it, but I haven't found out how.
The ignorance of file system structures is really terrible. It makes it almost impossible
to find the files that it saves, and it's overly cumbersome for directories with more than
a few files in them. Even my normal Saturday photos would be a pain.
Even with this “modern” GUI interface, it's easier to use than hugin,
which requires lots of additional specifications before it goes off and does its thing.
The documentation is even worse than for hugin. Potentially I could have navigated
much better if there had just been a tutorial, for example.
It could be so much easier with just better structuring: wouldn't it be so much
easier to be able to write this?
$ cd ~/Photos/20090808 $ panorama verandah-panorama.jpeg verandah-?.jpeg
But that's “command line”! Oh horror! That's (apparently) too complicated
for the GUI generation.
Photo day today, and after my net positive experience with Panorama
Maker 5 Pro, decided to try comparison panoramas made with hugin. It's a good thing I did: it seems
that my success yesterday was beginner's luck. Here's what Panorama Maker Pro made
of some of the panoramas. First, the verandah panorama that worked so well yesterday. For
some reason, it completely confused Panorama Maker Pro, which apparently ignored two
of the component images and showed off its specific features by putting the other three
images vertically:
For some reason it also changed the colour balance.
OK, that was “auto”, a good chance to try to tell it to do it horizontally, and
that worked. I've always known that the verandah panorama is a tricky one due to the depth
of field, though hugin would never have generated such complete nonsense. The one
from the north-east of the garden has never given hugin any problems, but it confused
the hell out of Panorama Maker Pro (second image):
Somehow it managed to get the photos in the wrong order, with the result that the house was
included twice. Maybe it didn't like the amount of overlap, but that should make things
easier, not harder. Went into the manual stitch mode, where it again ordered the photos in
the wrong sequence, conveniently omitting the names in the display:
I had named the files garden-ne-a.jpeg to garden-ne-g.jpeg, left to right, so
the one in the middle should in fact have been on the extreme right. The only way to find
out the names (shown here) was to position the mouse on the image and wait a second or so,
after which the EXIF data summary appears. To fix things, you drag the photos to where they
fit, a thing that takes forever on my old Apple.
After doing that and restitching, things look better, but not much:
Here's the opposite effect from the duplicate cat in the panorama I did yesterday. This
time Arcsoft has given me a duplicate lime tree. Here a detail from the hugin
panorama, and what Arcsoft made of it:
This is an order of magnitude worse than the duplicate cats. The duplicate cats occurred
because the cat had physically moved between the component photos. Here the lime tree
clearly hasn't moved: the software hasn't been able to recognize that the images are the
same. And the difference in angle must come from the software: these shots were taken from
a tripod with a pan head, not a ball head (which could have changed the angle).
It also made a mess of the panorama from the north, again including the house twice. Of the
four panoramas I take, it only got one right first time, the simplest one. When I started
taking photos this morning, I was seriously considering buying Panorama Maker Pro.
It's a good thing I did more tests; now I wouldn't use it if it were free.
