PTGui does the World Cup

New York producer Humble TV was tasked with designing a series of 60 second 'team trailers' for ESPN's coverage of the 2010 football World Cup. Built around a green screen performance by Djimon Honsou, creative director Sam Stephens of Humble TV envisi...

New Website

That was about time! PTGui finally has a new website. The old site had been around since 2003 and had began to show its age many many years ago already. Apart from the home page, all content has been preserved under the...

Museo del Prado in 14 gigapixels

PTGui was used to create extremely detailed 14 Gigapixel reproductions of masterpieces from the Museo del Prado in Madrid, viewable in Google Earth. Watch the video to see how it was done:

PTGui 9.1.9 released

We've just released PTGui version 9.1.9! Although it's a small update it does bring a few useful new features: Panoramas can now be geotagged directly in PTGui. Click on the Metadata button in the Create Panorama tab to open the new ...

PTGui 10 released!

After several months of beta testing PTGui 10 is now officially released!

The most important change is entirely under the hood and has been under development for over two years: PTGui 10 features a new stitching engine, rebuilt from scratch to get the best peformance on modern hardware. On computers with a recent graphics card (GPU) the new stitcher uses OpenCL for GPU acceleration, but regular CPU stitching performance has been significantly improved as well. For certain projects we've seen up to 10 times faster stitching compared to the previous version!

To complement the Publish to Website tool, PTGui 10 includes a spherical panorama viewer for local viewing. Spherical panoramas can now be viewed from PTGui without the need to install third party software. The viewer is a standalone tool: it can view any equirectangular panorama in TIFF or JPEG format stored on your computer.

Finally the Pro version includes a new tone mapper. The new tone mapper is easy to configure and gives very natural looking results. The tone mapper can now be enabled even for non-HDR panoramas, improving the quality of panoramas of high contrast scenes.

For an overview of the new features see What's new in PTGui 10. See the version history for a detailed list changes.

To download the new version choose Help -> Check for Updates or see the Download page.

Fotografia immersiva

Marco Stucchi has written an extremely detailed Italian tutorial for stitching spherical panoramas with PTGui: Fotografia immersiva

Praxisbuch Digitale Panoramafotografie

Thomas Bredenfeld has just published his new book (in German) 'Praxisbuch Digitale Panoramafotografie' and PTGui is covered in detail. About the book:

Erstellen Sie Panoramen wie ein Profi! Thomas Bredenfeld führt Sie in die Welt der digitalen Panoramafotografie: Erfahren Sie, welche Ausrüstung für das Erstellen von Panoramen sinnvoll ist, lernen Sie anhand von anschaulichen Beispielen die richtige Aufnahmetechnik kennen und wie Sie Ihre Vorlagen am Rechner perfekt zusammenfügen. Der Autor gibt Ihnen auch Tipps für die attraktive Präsentation Ihrer Bilder. Mit Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitungen schaffen Sie schnell und leicht den Einstieg in den komplexen Workflow. Die beiliegende DVD beinhaltet außerdem unterschiedliche Stitching-Tools, so dass Sie Ihre Aufnahmen am PC gleich zu beeindruckenden Panoramen zusammenfügen können.

Website: Praxisbuch Digitale Panoramafotografie

PTGui 9.1 released

Today we've released version 9.1 of PTGui and PTGui Pro. Several handy new features have been added in this release:

The new Align to Grid tool makes it easy to stitch gigapixel panoramas using a motorized panoramic head. Also, image alignment for wide angle images (and fisheye images in particular) has been improved. Further there are lots of usability improvements such as more context menus, a new 'ghost cursor' and the ability to generate control points in a rectangular area.

For an overview of the new features see What's new in PTGui 9.1.

To download the new version choose Help -> Check for Updates or see the Download page.

Book: Virtual Reality Photography

VR photography pioneer Scott Highton's book 'Virtual Reality Photography' is now shipping. About the book:

From pioneering VR photographer Scott Highton, comes the long awaited and much anticipated book, Virtual Reality Photography.

Through twenty four detailed chapters, Scott shares his extensive knowledge about every aspect of successful panoramic and object VR photography. Richly illustrated, the book is a vast resource of tips, techniques, and instruction – chock full of both artistic and technical detail.

The book belongs in the hands of every multimedia author and photographer, whether part-time hobbyist or full-time professional, who has an interest in learning the secrets of good virtual reality (VR) photography.


Website: Virtual Reality Photography

ICCI 360 Festival, Plymouth (UK)

The University of Plymouth will be organizing the ICCI 360 festival from Monday 13th to Saturday 18th September 2010. The ICCI 360 Festival arena consists of a huge 21 metre diameter dome incorporating a 62m x 6m high projection screen and a large performance space which uses cutting edge technology with surround sound and high resolution projection facilities to provide a fantastic immersive 360°, panoramic, digital experience.

More information: ICCI 360 Festival 2010

Producing panoramics of artworks

Factum Arte just published an interesting writeup of their workflow for producing extremely high resolution images of artworks: read more...

Last space shuttle flights

nasatech.net is currently showing unique panoramas and photos of the final missions of the space shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour. The final space shuttle flight STS-135 is set for launch in July 2011 - view the panorama gallery.