My Autopano Pro forum

Hi Beeloba, alpha support in APP is a great addition to an already great product... but, I can't get it to work correctly.

When I import the tiffs with alpha an APP they show up good in the "panorama detector", also the alpha channel is shown. After a successful detection and projection only the images without alpha show up an the canvas. Also in de Panorama Editor window I get a canvas without all the images with alpha. When I switch to Interpolation > Nearest Neighbor I can finally see my image. This  error also happens during rendering. Only when Nearest Neighbor Interpolation is selected does the render engine recognize the alpha channels but fails again then the project get bigger.

I tested this with a small project of 3 x 2MP tiff witch only rendered correctly with nearest neighbor interpolation.

I also tested alpha support on a big project of 36 x 2MP tiff. This time the images with alpha channels seem to be misinterpreted by APP resulting in garbled pixels.

image1.jpg > Images with alpha

image2.jpg > After detection and projection

image3.jpg > Editor window Interpolation > Nearest Neighbor

Nadir:

When stitching fisheye spherical pano I use circular crop for nadir. My feet and legs are visible in the nadir shoot but I crop this shoot using circular crop until they disappear. An additional advantage of this is that the stitching is less disturbed by my approximative camera placement for the nadir shot and the match better because CPs are located in this rather small size circle only (ideally I would optimize without the nadir, add the nadir, then optimize the nadir only, but my attempts at that failled...)

I produce two layers, one group does not include the nadir and the other one is a "nadir only" group. I prefer to blend them manually using PS.

Hole in the sky:

After some few attempts where I was able to use masked TIF source images, I found it's easiest to mask the stitched result rather than the sources images! My opinion may vary if Smartblend could be used with masked TIFF, but I'm certain that in some occasions it's difficult to mask the overlap area only, difficult to mask multiple overlap and difficult to guess the stitched result.

When using layers during post-processing the result is visible "in real time" and stepping backward is easy...

Last edited by GURL (2007-12-09 14:29:48)

fixed