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 One of the widespread and talked about pano makers is PT Assembler - an interface bringing together a set of panorama editing programs. Pt Assembler is the most manual oriented program of all I reviewd in this series. Thus organized it should be very attractive for professionals, or just people with profound experience in panorama stitiching. For amateurs and beginners like me Pt Assembler may become a complicated riddle. but let us have a better look.
The PT Assembler workflow has 5 steps. Every step is explained to some point by the help screen appearing automatically at every opening of the program and every step change until you cancel it.
First step lets you add the images intended for panorama.
After opening them you can press the auto create button and with the Autostitch or AutoPano installed and written in PT Assembler preferences your Panorama will be stitched and optimized automatically.
The result of the automatic stitching is quite good. Regretfully, though, I was unable to autostitch the test image used in all other reviews. The program could not open the images and appeared not to see them.
Some other images, though, were stitched all right, as I said, and had acceptable quality:
For panoramas with which Autocreate could not do anything there's the manual method.
2nd step of the program is for setting lens options and some other stitching parameters. The lens parameters can be estimated automatically with the exif information or set manually.
You can even specify the lens value once and for all in Preferences, provided you always use same camera.
Step three brings you to control points setting. There are no auto options here. The program gives recommendations - to set 5 to 8 control points for each pair. No estimation for the quality of control points apart from numbers appearing in the left bottom corner table is given.
Step 4 brings the user to optimization screen. Here you are to choose reference image and set reference point that will define the horizon line and vertical orientation of the panorama. Reference image is used, as the programs hints, to optimize all other images. The optimization can be done automatically (it is done by ptoptimizer program). But you can also choose images to be excluded from auto optimization. Reduce optimization to autolevelling. Or simply do everything manually by going to manual options.
At the end of optimization progress you get a screen with the evaluation of whether the resulted panorama is successful or, may be, not possible at all. If the prediction is bad you can return one or more steps back and try to save the situation with other settings and control points.
the good prospects will bring you the final step with the preview of panorama and settings for the final image generation.
You specify here the final image size (the width can be automatically estimated by the program), choose whether to post process the image or not and choose the final image format. the choice of output formats is very diverse: it can be .jpg, .psd (with or without layers), .tiff, .bmp, QTVR, QuickTime.
As for the quality of the panoramas, my feeling is ambiguous here. The auto stitched images are fine and quite quick to produce. With manual stitching I had no luck at all. Whatever parameters and control points I applied the result was never satisfying. Here are just a few examples of what I got as a result:
And, finally:
As you see, not one image was without problems.
My conclusion here - PTAssembler is for those who are ready to invest their time and patience into learning the program to use all the power of the program and get the best result. There are all the means for it - online tutorials and manuals, a discussion forum and even a focal length and other parameters calculator.
For those, though, who want minimum effort and acceptable result quickly this program is a poor choice.
PTAssembler is shareware, meaning you are expected to "register" it (i.e. pay a small amount) to purchase the program. PTAssembler will operate for 30 days without restriction, but some features will be restricted if not registered after 30 days.
All the detail on registering and help options can be found at www.tawbaware.com.
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