Photoshop CS3 Auto-blend feature for panoramas - Tests with PTGui, Smartblend and Enblend

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This is the final Choice using CS3 Autoblend + a small manual correction

Click on image for fullscreen Quicktime VR 360 degree panorama - Quicktime needed

Blending Tests using PTGui - Enblend - Smartblend and the new Photoshop CS3 Auto-Blend

To see some more examples click here

Blending large multirow panoramas with CS3 Auto-Blend

PtGui blender

This panorama was made at the Aarhus Festival in August. 4 images with a Canon 5D + Nikkor 10,5mm (sunshade removed ) Monopod on tripod at about 2.5m height.

Several problems because people moved between images. 1. duplicate red bag. 2. Man with camera got 3 hands. 3 missing shoulder

Enblend produced almost identical blend with the same errors as PTGui blender.

Smartblend did a stitch which solved the first to problems but No 3 became worse.

Also this was not how I wanted the stitch. See next

This is a panorama using PTgui blended + layers. The stitching errors was corrected manually in Photoshop which took only about 12 minutes, same time as Smartblend used for blending.

Photoshop CS3 new autoblend feature. Blending took about 1 minute including saving the panorama

The layers was moved slightly because autoblend is not blending over the 360 degree wrap. (se below) The child on the shoulder in the left side was removed by CS3, besides that it is perfect.

Because the blended result is with masks and still has the 4 layers intact you can easy correct it.

Adding the child on the shoulder took only a couple of minutes.

View the final Panorama as Quicktime VR

This is what happens if you have images which needs blending over the 360 degree wrap. In most cases you can easy move the layers so that the wrap is in the center of one image.

Image 2/3 needs blending over the 360 degree wrap.

This is what caused the error to the left.

Moving the layers with the offset filter to this position solves the problem.

Usually you will have them in this position if you are using a yaw starting with zero and with equal distances for the images like 90, 60, or 30 degrees.If not you can easy change the positions when exporting from PTGui or PTMac.

I have no experince of how you do it in Stitcher.