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  • Photovista test
    Tests and tutorials by Hans Nyberg
    Photovista is probably the fastest stitcher available today.
    I have made some tests with the images from my Canon D60 and the Sigma 15-30 mm.

    The images are 2048x3072 and the FOV you get is about 72-74 degree with 15 mm on D60. You need 12 images but as I do not count them, just shoot by turning looking through viewfinder I sometimes get 13 sometimes 11. Photovista does not care at all. It sets everything automatically. You need only to set the lens to 24 mm or what ever. Then let Photovista make a finetuning and it does the rest.
    As you can see to the right the Sigma 15 mm has quite a lot of barrel distortion.

    I made a stitch without correcting this and a stitch with the images corrected using Panotools.
    The final stitch was 3272x14976 pixels cylindrical. A giant of 130 mb

    The stitch is a spheric pano but you can convert directly to cylindrical mapping or even a cubic version if you want to make a cubic and has to add the top or bottom. The cubic is saved as one single image not 6 images, You can convert back to spheric in Photovista after editing in Photoshop.

    Photovista is the only stitcher which can handle full frame fisheye images. I have used it for my Pentax 17-28 mm Fish eye sometimes with fairly good results. However I have had no luck in using it for the Sigma 8 mm images.
    Just a warning: When you stitch large panoramas with Photovista you will not be able to see the final stitch. You can see the pano in the viewer but you get a grey area for the image. I had Photovista set to 120 mb but it did not help with this very large panorama. However there is no problem, just save the image and open it in Photoshop. It´s there.

    I do not know if this problem also exists for the Windows version.
    Time for stitching:
    • Correcting 13 images for barreldistortion with batch Photoshop action
    • Import images to Photovista rotating, setting up the lens,
      finetuning and preview stitch:
    • Stitching full resolution 3272x14976 image + converting to cylindric:
    • Editing in Photoshop,sharpening, saturation and adjusting size for QTVR
      2 sizes (the 96 Divisible)
    • Making the QTVR with the free old QTVRMakePanorama tool from Apple

    • 2 minutes
    • 3 minutes

    • 9 minutes
    • 10 minutes

    • 2 minutes
      -----------------
      26 minutes

    View the final QTVR movies:

    No editing besides sharpening and saturaton was made. Even from the uncorrected images you get an acceptable stitch. The stitch from the corrected images is almost perfect. There are to small errors which I would correct in Photoshop. It can be done in less than 5 minutes.

    Photovista is today only available in a Windows version, which by the way is much better than the old Mac 1.0 version I have. They have said for many years that a new Mac version will come but the new owner has not made any announcements as far as I know.

    Photovista is available from Red Door in England

    or Kaidan who still has the demo for Mac but only the PC version for sale

    and the price $49.95

    QTVR.dk copyright hans nyberg - hans@nyberg.com

    View the Full Screen of the week at www.panoramas.dk
    Featuring the worlds best VR Photographers.