Creating Panoramas with PTGui and Panotools

Introduction - Loading the images and automatic control point generation - Panorama settings and projection types - Revising control points and levelling the horizon - Stitching and blending

This is an introduction into basic stitching techniques using Panotools and PTGui in five steps.
If you are already familiar with the basics and are more interested in creating full spherical panoramas using a fisheye, then please look here!

Software:

The following Software is used during this tutorial. You can click on the hyperlinks to go to the homepage of the respective Software Developer/Company:

Panotools and PTGui (Version 5.1 used for this tutorial)
Autopano (Optional)
Enblend and Smartblend (Optional) - See also the PTGui Plugins page
Irfanview
FSPViewer (Optional - for previewing equirectangular projections)
For retouching the images: A program that is able to work with layers, e.g. Photoshop or Gimp

Thanks to Brooks Leffler for proof-reading and correcting this tutorial!

A first introduction to PTGui:

You will occasionally see such green boxes in the text. The text inside will discuss special topics which are not relevant for understanding the basic process.

Please note that the methods discussed here are only a subset of techniques for creating a VR-Panorama. You are invited also just to research your own methods - and not only follow this tutorial word by word...

When starting PTGui you will notice 2 different windows. The Main Window...

...and the "Panorama Editor" window:

The main window will assist you in the correct workflow for panorama creation. We will mainly follow the given tab sequence.
The editor window will show your working progress visually and will enable editing your panorama through "point and shoot" interaction.

We will now create a panorama by using 5 photos, shot handheld in portrait mode.
If you want to follow the tutorial by using my example pictures, you can download them here (1.8 MB) and extract them to a folder called "C:\tutorial".

In comparison to the previous versions of PTGui, Ver. 5 has tons of new features - one of them is a very helpful Assistant which we will heavily use for creating our panorama.

Before we start for the first time, we have to define some helper applications - at least an image viewer to be able to preview our stitching results. Go to the menu "Tools" - "Options" and select the tab "Directories & Files". Define the correct path to your installed viewer application(s) as shown below:

You may also want to configure your plugins if you plan to use them. Here is an example:

Next step: Selecting your images