Alexander 6, V86.

 My hand is killing me with the pain in the wrist area. Luckily, it's my right hand and not the left, as I'm a lefty. I don't feel like going to some clinic to check for this, as the pain has been there for 3 weeks now. I decided instead to make something at home, some oils and stuff and wrap it up, but unfortunately I've forgot to do so! To decide for something is something, and to do that thing is something else!

I'm still working on the (new) gamma lab panorama, and unfortunately met some difficulty, starting from the weird pinkish plots on the image (and I still don't know where do they come from), and ending with a memory crisis, as usual.

 

I was trying my best yesterday with the Autodesk stitcher to stitch my office panorama, but as usual, I couldn't find any use out of it. First of all, when loading the HDR images it gave an error message saying that only images of the same size (compared to the first image on the list) will be loaded. Hence, not all images are loaded. Why? Well, when I do a batch-process and convert all the exposure-bracketed images into HDR images, there is an option I'm supposed to tick in the Photomatix machine, that is "Don't crop". The crop here is to eliminate some tiny pixels on the edges of the final image after combining into a HDR, because sometimes the camera vibrates, moves, shakes..etc and Photomatix aligns images either according to common features, or according to regular shifts in the vertical or horizontal planes. After merging into HDR, and if your sequence is moving a bit, Photomatix crops the excess of pixels on the sides to make the image look neat. For this reason, you would rather have some problems loading your images into Autodesk stitcher, but never with PTGui.

I love the pain, so, I batch-processed the whole thing again and this time with no cropping. Loaded the images into Stitcher, but alas, controlling was hard to do, and I was not able to raise the exposure value for the HDR images up, because they were dark a bit and wanted to see the features clearly. Stitching was so time consuming and loading as well.

As a final trial, I've tone-mapped the whole new set of HDR images and put them down to TIFF-16bit format. The process might have been a bit faster but alas, the stitching was hideous and a mess. So, why I'm even trying with this software in the first place? Here you go.

According to Harald Woeste, in his book "Master Digital Panoramic Photography", he used this software in many stitches for his panoramas. Mainly, there is one option that looks very interesting in this software, and that is the Stencil tool.

 

This stencil tool works like the layer mask in Photoshop layers; It allows you to remove or recover some features in the stitch by adjusting what part to be blended or masked and what to show up. This feature specifically was used by Harald in one of his panoramas, as mentioned in his book, in a case similar to what I'm trying to do here; showing a person in several locations in the same panorama. The moving object in panoramas is not a favorable topic and a hideous one too, but when you desire this effect for a purpose, you need a grip on the topic. Autodesk sounded a good choice with the stencil tool, but in my case the stitch was almost a mess that I couldn't retrieve the main features of the panorama at all to even begin with the stencil tool. It is unfortunate that PTGui does not have such a feature, although it can save the panorama completely into separate layers with their own layer masks in order to be fixed in Photoshop, but we should talk here about memory issues... specially for a poor guy like me! :(

Yet still, I will try to understand Autodesk Stitcher as much as possible. I think I have to re-visit Harald's book and look again into that project explanation to see what I'm missing. The main point is, Autodesk Stitcher itself is hard to control and to understand, simply as that! While PTGui can be almost self-explanatory, even for a beginner.

This said now, I need to "waste" more of my time with Autodesk Stitcher in order to understand the work here. Sounds a bit awkward now that it might be my only hope in this situation!

__________
2041. the two collected branches from the forest from other trees
2042. they picked the most greenish branches from the trees
2043. Alexander asked for certain number of branches
2044. then Alexander started to make cuts into the bark
2045. and he planted a branch in each cut inside the tree
2046. then he brought the ropes he had before and tied them all
2047. Kaliván then asked: how this is going to heal the tree?
2048. and Alexander replied: think about it O Kaliván,
2049. the tree bear fruit with its branches like the hands,
2050. thus the first thing would be is to give her hands,
2051. and soon the roots of the branches will connect with it,
2052. and then be part of the mother tree who is young again now
2053. then Kaliván asked: and you think this will fix Jawsamályá?
2054. Alexander replied: I am not sure about it since I never experienced it,
2055. your world, O Kaliván, got things I never saw before,
2056. I can barely accept the idea that there is no sun here!
2057. Kaliván raised an eyebrow and said: sun? what is sun?
2058. but Alexander replied rapidly: nothing, forget it for now,
2059. we have more important matters to think of right now,
2060. how to get Jawsamályá back to its balance as before?
2061. and just when Alexander finished his sentence
2062. some weird breeze started coming out from no where
2063. and Kaliván knelt down and said: kneel Alexander!
2064. and Alexander knelt down and looked up

Alexander 6, V31

One heck of a day! Man I just can't pull a muscle in my body without aching. No work in my personal projects today; no transliteration, no report writing for my friend, and no surfing around.
Imagine yourself carrying a 12 kg device (around 26 lb) from one place to another with a laptop and a tripod that had a broken leg, how would it be like? Yep, sucks. The only thing now I'm sorry for is that I couldn't bring my camera to snap images for the place from the outside or inside. The building looks neat in the outside but it is still not complete yet nor inhabited inside. Renovation work was all around. I had just to fix the device on the tripod and wait for 30 minutes to make 30 readings and that's it. In two locations. But the fact that my car was parked somehow far away from the entrance and that we have a lovely sun, made one damn thing of the whole thing. The building looks nice from the outside with the logo of Viva Telecom. I really don't know how I drove back to my office, and now I'm thinking seriously about one week of vacation, as I told a friend earlier.

I spent last night working on some panorama as usual and this time I really wanted to work on Autodesk's Stitcher program. I think I've wronged the software a bit in my last post saying that it does not support HDR images, but in fact it does. It supports OpenEXR and Radiance formats (.exr and .hdr respectively). The thing is, it is not as flexible as PTGui still. When I loaded some EXR files, it did not accept them all (and even for normal JPG files), because their dimensions might be different slightly in some pixels. PTGui never showed this problem to me. On the other hand it was useful but still I need to understand more about the QTVR aspect. I could easily load a panorama and it will convert it to a QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality). I need to grasp more about the pixel dimensions and how to make the default window fit, because the original QTVR was 25MB and I wanted to resize that to a smaller size, and yet, I couldn't get a good resolution when the player run the QTVR. Finally, I've resized the panorama itself to something smaller and made a QVTR out of it. The player should be fixed to half of the "original" size (in the View menu) so that no blurry pixels occur to the eyes. I was trying to put my file here but still I don't know to use it (probably by using HTML and putting my file some where on the net and grab it here).
PTGui also supports QTVR, but it goes on with a spherical coordinates, while Autodesk stitcher makes it in a cylindrical format. In my case the cylindrical format is better for the time being because most of my panoramas lack the zenith (top) and nadir (below).

The Guest Room panorama is still on the go now. I made several versions out of it and I felt so tired to fix it really. There was one thing though that made me surprised with PTGui. I rendered the panorama in Little Planet projection and, the optimization turned out 'Very Good!' ! I was surprised and somehow I did indeed believed the theory that this panorama specifically must be in a circular (or little planet) shape. After stitching I surprisingly discovered that it contained more errors than the semi-regular ones! I can't really tell how did the optimization process go to turn out a very good result.

However, I tried to reduce the amount of flare, or should I say, the hot colors in the images, but this should be done before tone-mapping even. When I tried that with some "cool color" Photo Filter layer in Photoshop, it did not go well enough when I tried to tone-map later. So, I kept it HOT as it is. I made 3 main panoramas:

1. Normal (to some extent):

2. Goldish Hue:

 3. The Dirty Look:

Now, why I made the dirty look version is something else. I was trying in fact to make a spooky place by adding so much darkness and fainting the colors and make them less saturated. But I think it didn't turn out well, but instead, it would be fit for a regular dirty place. I think what we need here is some visual effects and not mereily a play of light in the scene. I was tired to clean the tripod away. There are as well still some broken lines, but maybe not so obvious in this smaller version here.

Right now, I'm going to have one week of vacation starting from next Thursday, and hopefully I will keep posting here while taking a rest at home for real, although one week is not a big deal I would say really. I'm just in need for nice sleep. Really.

__________
721. then Alexander peeked into the great groove
722. then he looked at Utéfah and this he said
723. "what else did you read in the papers of Ázilis?"
724. and Utéfah replied: what I read was a lot,
725. but for now you just need to know where to go,
726. keep the Charnagút in your hand and never let it go,
727. it is a sword assigned by your name,
728. put it on the side of the groove and step on it,
729. it will guide you to the great gate of the Ayvar lands
730. and the hero wondered to Utéfah: you mean the gate is in this groove?
731. and Utéfah replied: this is what I cannot tell because I do not know
732. so Alexander put the Charnagút on the side of the groove
733. and stepped on it while the moon's light grew bigger
734. and slowly like a foggy dream some steps appeared
735. and down to the groove they went
736. they were shiny like blocks of light
737. but Alexander stood amazed looking at Utéfah
738. and this he did say: are you not coming with me O good man?
739. but Utéfah shook his head left and right to say No
740. and Alexander urged him to come down with him
741. and Utéfah smiled and said: you trusted God all this time,
742. thus there is no need to put a trust in me,
743. for I am nothing but a grain of dust,
744. and the task was destined for you in the Beginning

Alexander 6, V30.

Again and again. Issues with this damn connection like every morning. I'm connecting now to a wireless network that is sittled in the building next to us, and my ethernet cable is not working at all. Even the signal from that building is low, so I'm expecting problems soon. This is a nice way to say 'good morning' to me by this working place. I can't even understand how did I wake up in the first place.
Still struggling with my Guest Room Panorama here. This time, I played around and around with the 8-bit images trying to fix something suitable panorama to make as a template. I also tried another software, Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited.

 

Although many people talk about this software and about its strong algorithm in stitching, but I rarely use it and, unfortunately, I rarely find it useful for me. It has an option to produce a QTVR (those 360 panoramas that you can move around in). Maybe I shall try to make panoramas by PTGui and use this software to make the adequate effects. As why it is not so useful for me, here you go, some of the reasons:

1. Does not support HDR files (although there is a menu for HDR in the program itself but can't find out how it functions). [It does]

2. Unlike PTGui, I can't find my way through the program. It has some buttons and that's it for me. Tried to experiment with it but I couldn't learn much out of it. So mysterious.

3. Unlike PTGui as well, it's full automatic (even with some extra options to control images in a panorama).

4. Some buttons there, just don't have the pop-up comment to make you understand what it does. I ended pushing buttons all the way trying to find their effects to learn, and yet I couldn't see any effect, and still I don't know what they do at all!

5. Some options are not as easy as PTGui like panning or rotating, but it has zooming in and out which PTGui does not have in the display window after stitching a model.

Well, maybe you might say I should read tutorials before working with the software, but let's be serious, does any read them before working with a software unless later? I found out (and still learning more) from PTGui and still I didn't read much of its help file (except for few times when I wanted to know the definition of some projections and the meaning of some terms, yet I was using them already). Anyway, Autodesk Stitcher is one of the recommended programs (along with others) that were mentioned in Harald Woeste's book, Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography.

 

And so far, I'm not giving up with it. I will have to try more in some way. It might come in handy when working with 8- or 16-bit images, but unfortunately it doesn't open HDR images, and hence, it's on the side at the moment. If you ask me, I think $329.99 is a bit too much for the software.

Back to the panorama, and after trying out Autodesk's software, I couldn't do much, so I'm back to PTGui trying more tricks from the bag here and there and changing some values. I did something but I couldn't check up with the results since I had to fall asleep indeed! This time I changed what's called, the pitch. In panorama softwares usually (and also in other softwares that stretch and morph the images I guess), there are 3 variables that can be controlled to change the orientation of the image: a) Yew, b) Pitch, c) Roll. I laughed when I read these 3 terms in the first time really, but then I understood they are more like a coordinates system; just like (X,Y,Z) or (R,Theta, Phi) [yeah, that's spherical coordinates system]. At least this is how I imagine it to make things easy for my brain. We physicists got weird trends and fashions, trust me.

However, Yew is supposedly to control the panning from left to right and so on. It can be done manually with click and drag by the mouse, but you can also make this precise without any handshake that might shake the panorama up and down by just inserting some number (degrees) in the dialogue box specified for this.

Pitch, which is the value I changed, controls the curving of the panorama. I can also think of it as dragging the panorama up and down as well. I did this and I found out that more lines are connected easily at the bottom of the image and hence, the broken lines in the rugs were fixed to some extent!

Left to say, Roll, is the value or degrees to rotate the panorama around its center. All these three values can be also edited for any single image in the panorama as well, but this is a far reach for me since I got blinded already when I worked with control points alone!

The panorama above now, is not the final product and as you can see this yellowish or goldish hue is just a result of fat tone-mapping by Photomatix to reduce the HDR and make some images to build my template upon. Upon that configuration, the optimization process rendered and yielded 'Good'. For this, I saved the template (and the panorama image as well) and I apply it directly to the list of HDR images without doing any oprimizations. Unfortunately, the stitching process took a long time as usual and I was already preparing to go to bed. The red (supposedly) rug is stretched at the bottom and the tripod legs aren't cloned out, but it is not important for the time being since it is just an example here. I'm not bothered much by the stretched red rug, which I think can be easily cropped from the bottom. This curve emphasizes the idea I had in my mind before, that the spherical projection (or sometimes called Equirectilinear) is not the best way to represent this particular panorama yet. I think a Little Planet (Stereographic projection) would be fit more. I shall try this later. An idea I'm thinking of right now as well is, to apply the Transverse Equirectilinear projection. As I understand it, it is a spherical projection but it works on the images or starts to stitch the images in a flipped position, like 90 degrees. Sounds logical to me, if the normal spherical projection works for normal landscape orientation of images, then the transverse version might work perfectly for the portrait images, like in my case.

As it is usual with every Monday, the day does not come without any surprises (except of few times when the bad surprised were delayed to the next day). I was asked to watch over a group of students in their exam, and it was tricky and hard to go through out the situation and refuse. I could barely bear myself as a student and now I have to watch over them and see if they are cheating or not... ugh. Add to that now, there is a plan that I might have to go out and "collect" some data from somewhere accompanied by some people that I don't know really... great. Seems it is just another one long week...

__________

697. Alexander then asked: is it a treasure that I am seeking?
698. and Utéfah answered: what you are seeking is greater than a treasure,
699. but this man's head made tricks on his soul,
700. and he imagined that you are after the gold and silver,
701. I read some papers from Ázilis, the blessed,
702. and I know what to do next and where to go,
703. but first we must find the Charnagút
704. then Alexander said: but I lost it, maybe to the groove,
705. I cannot seem to find any trace of it after the fight
706. and Utéfah replied: call upon it by the name of God,
707. and kneel down on your knees to show the respect,
708. verily the Charnagút will come back to your hand
709. thus Alexander slowly bent down on his knees
710. and shouted with his voice like a roaring lion
711. "by the name of God, I call upon you O Charnagút"
712. it was but moments and the sword raised up in the air
713. and slowly went into the palm of Alexander
714. then Alexander turned around to Utéfah with a smile
715. and this he said: verily there are lot of tricks that you have O Utéfah,
716. was all of that mentioned in the papers of the blessed Ázilis?
717. and Utéfah replied: yes O good king, he kept these papers away from others,
718. thus when I saw them separated I knew they are special,
719. so then I read them and they were written with Yabjadítah
720. just like Ázilis taught us all how to write it and read it