Autopano Giga Changelog

What's new in Autopano Giga 4.0.2

• New color correction engine
• This is the first big change under the hood. Visually, you won't see many changes, everything is behind.
• What is the color correction engine?
• First, It is not only about color, but also about exposure, hdr calibration, etc. This algorithm is the way we calculate relative exposure between images, color cast, etc. The real name is radiometric calibration. For the lenses, we calculate lens distortion parameters. Here, for the color, we calculate color parameters for images and lenses, depending on exposure, aperture, iso. So, what's new in the new color engine ?
• Vignetting correction: In big panoramas, especially with blue skies, it appeared that vignetting was an effect that prevented us from getting a perfectly stitched panorama without any banding in the sky. Now, we can measure that effect and remove it.
• Gradient correction: This is a new concept that we discovered when stitching blue skies. It appears that some lenses have some coating that have an effect on the color in the sky. It also happens when you put some IR filter on the lens. It modifies the way the colors are transmitted through the lens and creates a strange gradient on the images. That effect is different from vignetting and it seems that we are the first in the world to have found this new type of color calibration effect. We found no literature about it yet.
• Default anchor: In the previous engine, the software decided the default anchor image for you, the one that would be used as color reference for all others. It worked well, but we could do better. Now, by default, there won't be any color reference image, all images will be optimized. The result on the panorama is that the global panorama is closer to all images, instead of close to the reference image.
• Color correction on big panorama: As the optimization system has been changed, now it is possible to easily have global optimization done on big panoramas. Even if you decide to have just one reference anchor in a big panorama, it will work, as the color/exposure propagates its values now to all the panorama.
• WIP UI: The UI has been improved to support the new engine. Everything is now happening on the right click on an image. You can decide from there what you want to correct for that image. You can also globally change the default settings of color correction in the column menu while you are in the color correction mode. There is room for improvement here and we are waiting for feedback on the UI for color correction.
• Fast editor
• When we looked at feature requests from users, we found out that it was more important for you to be able to work fast in the editor than to render fast. Rendering can be run during night, but if you need to edit a panorama, you need to be behind the screen. So we decided to concentrate on how we could accelerate the editor. The fast editor is the result of that speed up. Again, that's not really a visual feature, as everything again is behind the scene. You will just see a new flag in general setting that says, fast editor, enabled or not. By default, it is on, of course. So, how does the fast editor work?
• Zooming / panning: When panning, zooming in, zooming out, you should feel that everything is super fast now. We use clever gpu techniques to be able to get you instantaneous feedback in the editor. In Autopano 4, we opened the Paris-26-gigapixels panorama on a laptop and were able to work on it, having no problem looking at every zone of the panorama, even at 100%. It is really, really fast.
• Small visual artifacts: To be able to accelerate everything, some compromises had to be made, which has resulted in possible temporary visual artifacts. These artifacts don't stay on screen very long, they are there during only a few seconds until the calculations are done. It doesn't prevent the use of the tool, makes it really fast, but visually, it might be distracting. Tell us what you think, if you are ok with these glitches or not.
• 4K / High DPI / Retina display support
• We've always cared about the visual comfort when using our software, and the experience should be enjoyable during use. But with the latest computers / laptops, everything is quickly evolving to use high resolutions on screen and high DPI. Our software should adapt to that evolution. Having an interface that adapts itself to high DPI / Retina display depends on the way the software is built. We use Qt for almost all our software. Qt should then be providing us with the solution for High DPI / Retina Display. It happens that Qt has provided this only really recently, with Qt 5.4. Our software relied on Qt 4.8 ( quite old ). It wasn't possible to make the switch before, as it does impact a lot of the codebase. We could only plan the switchover for a major update, as it also impacted the minimal OS configuration needed for the software. The result is that we now have a better interface, with Retina icons / high DPI screen support even for 4K screens. The switch also accelerates every part of the software related to displaying something on the screen. With this upgrade of Qt, we are also ready for Windows 10 and Mac Yosemite.
• Anti-ghost visual feedback ( APG only )
• In the Autopano engine, we are still the only stitcher that has an automatic anti-ghost algorithm that works for small projects, up to gigapixels. It does really save a lot of time for fixing ghost / parallax in hand held panorama, and it does so automatically. We decided to work on this algorithm to make it even more efficient and usable. What we did:
• Seams visual feedback: you can actually see where the anti-ghost algorithm decided to put the seams between images. This visualization of the seams is a great improvement and really helps understand overlapping / moving objects, etc. It is also compatible with our masking markers ( green / red ). Working in the mask editor is improved now.
• Stability of anti-ghost decisions: in previous versions, it could happen that the decision taken by the antighost algorithm in the editor, was not the same as the one taken during the rendering. This was not acceptable anymore if you have a visual feedback on seams. The problem with having the same decision is that a render is needed for the whole panorama before we can display anything on the screen ( even if the editor is opened on just a small part of the panorama. The whole panorama influences the antighost, not just the displayed zone ). So, even if it means an initial, global slow down of the preview at first, we decided to do a quick render of the global panorama when opening the mask editor so we can guarantee to display the real seam locations. You can also notice that when zooming into the realtime preview, the seams will refine themselves depending on the zoom factor, but they won't change location anymore.
• With these 2 improvements to the anti-ghost system, managing ghosts is really better. And we think that it is way faster than painting into input images. We were asked several times to add that feature. But with these improvements, we are waiting for feedback to see, if it is still considered needed or not.
• Miscellaneous
• Small screens supportOn some small displays, it was not really simple to use our editor because the tools were really big. We added sliders on several zones so that it is now easier to use on laptops for example.
• Qt and compilers updatesTo be really up to date in the development tools, we used here the latest version of both Qt and Intel compilers. You should notice a small improvement in terms of performance.
• PSD/PSB compressionYou can now activate PSD/PSB compression in RLE mode. It reduces the file size, but it can in some cases increase the rendering time. One note: if you really want to get the smallest file size and if you don't have embedded layers ( just a plain panorama in PSD/PSB ), uncheck the embedded checkbox and use RLE compression mode. This is the case where the file size will be the smallest. Still, if you open a PSD/PSB through Photoshop and save it again, depending on the case (with/without layers, compatibility mode or not), the file size can still be reduced.
• A clearer obsolete key messageThe message now states which version of the key you need to register the software with, which is clearer than the previous 'obsolete key' message. You know what to use directly in the software.
• Remove support of KRO file in inputIt happens that some users did try to use KRO files in input. The issue is that we don't support gigapixels in input, in any format. We removed that format in input to prevent injecting gigapixels.
• Gigapan import improvement: In some cases, with a lot of unlinked images, the Gigapan import could fail. We a lot of did work on this algorithm to make it more robust. With current Gigapan tests cases, the system is much more robust now, even in cases where you don't have the exif data anymore.
• Area selection tool: For editing big panoramas, you can use the ctrl/cmd key while dragging. It will create a rectangular selection zone. Any image with it's center inside this rectangle will be selected. This is a nice tool to move several images at the same time, for sky patching on gigapixels for example.
• Zenith and nadir blending: In some rare cases, you could notice strange behavior at the zenith or nadir where a spot is visible, as if the blending didn't work well on that zone. We found the solution for that and made it compatible with the automatic anti-ghost. You won't have any blending issues at the zenith anymore.
• Group management: When sorting images, it appeared that some of the functions that were on the right click on group were not that easy to use. We've improved them. Now, if you split a group at a given selected image, both groups stay close. Previously, the new group was created at the end of the group list. You have new function 'keep selected', just select some images in a group, use that, and it will remove all other images.
• Memory optimization: We measured memory usage when working on big projects. There was space for improvement in that area and now it should be possible to do 10,000 images panorama on much smaller computers than before. This is a good news for record breakers ( go out and shoot! ), but also for small configurations who will be able to stitch bigger projects.