proj-imim:
A True Believer... Finally!
Doug Brightwell 2000-May-12 22:44:11
As you may recall from my previous postings, I'm interested in large, hires
panos created from 3-4 4x5 originals for output as LightJet prints. For what
it's worth, I just wanted to report on my recent experiments with Panorama
Tools.
Since January when I first started trying to learn Pano Tools, I had
problems with getting things to align and getting PTools to work on larger
files without choking and giving me error messages. The documentation for
PTools is, well, uh... shall we say best suited to those with telepathic
abilities. :-) I was about to give up on what was to me a very important
aesthetic direction in my personal photography.
Just wanted to say that after sticking with it, and with Helmut's recent
revisions and advice, I finally made, as a proof of concept, an 18000 pixel
wide pano from three images. The images line up perfectly, the quality is
great. Of course, in the category of "there's no such thing as a free
lunch", the resulting 3-layer PSD file is 1Gb (yes, that's gigabyte).
Flattened, it will be about 514Mb. It should output to a LightJet at
304.8dpi at about five feet wide.
I did find that I had to process each of the three images independently in
PTStitcher, and I had to try different H & W settings for the p line. It
seems that on my computer, even with 1Gb of RAM, PTStitcher can only output
a file that's no larger than approximately w=12,000 and h=10,000. If you
give PTStitcher too much RAM, it will present an out of memory error
message. I allocate 200Mb of RAM to the app, and it grabs however much
additional RAM it needs... usually about 700-800Mb total. At times, it would
say it' can't allocated the required amount of memory (786Mb) even though it
had already grabbed well over 800Mb. There seems to be some funkiness
regarding how it works with RAM, and I had to try different settings until I
hit upon the right combination of h & w settings and RAM allocation that
would process my 195Mb originals without choking. Three 320Mb files
resulted, which when layered together came to 1Gb.
I know this list is focused on Panorama Tools for Web viewing, but I just
wanted to post this in case there's anyone else out there struggling with
the same issues I have been... and to say thanks to Helmut for making the
application available. What an amazing gift to the world!
Doug
--
Doug Brightwell
#removed#