[ptx] Re: Thoughts about an advanced preview

[Mike Runge]

Hi Pablo,

Pablo d'Angelo wrote:

>On Fri, 02 Jul 2004, Mike Runge wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Stimulated by the new previewer in snapshot 01-07-2004 I would like to 
>>discuss my thoughts about a more precise preview
>>
>>The old one (previous hugin builds) was very usable (because very fast) 
>>for looking at the general layout of a project. But I would think having 
>>a more precise one (including blend masks, distorsion) would be very 
>>usable. Maybe this should be some kind of an optional 'precise' previewer?!
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, I plan to do something like that. actually the old one included
>distortion, but not blend masks.
>
>  
>
>>I would like to inspect some areas of a hugin project in more detail 
>>without stitching all images in high resolution. So I would like to 
>>specify some images to stitch temporary and view directly from within 
>>hugin.
>>    
>>
>
>Hmm, might be useful, but its probably needs some time to implement.
>Anyway, specifying parts of a panorama for rendering is also interesting
>for normal stitching.
>
>Hmm, so you would like something like:
>1. select images
>2. do closeup stitch (will set the boundaries etc, to only include the
>   selected images.
>3. provide some way to switch back to the normal view.
>
>  
>
Working with 20-40 images and without blend mask you can only guess in 
the old preview if there is some misalignement or not.
I usually optimise the images and stitch them at mid dimension 
(4000x2000 or so) using nona (multilayer) without blending. Then I look 
for mismatches in the stitched image and rework the involved images 
(controlling/removing/adding controlpoints). To control, if my 
modifications were successfull, I would just stitch the involved 3 or 4 
images. It would not disturb me, if the dimensions would be the same 
than the complete panorama (even if there would be large transparent 
areas). This could be useful to modify 2 or three critical areas in one go.

>One question: how should the selection of the images look like? The
>current row of buttons doesn't look like a good solution. I haven't tried
>the new windows version yet, but from the mails I see that the buttons
>became wider in wxWidgets 2.5.2 under windows.
>
>  
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Yes,
the buttons are way too large. On a 1280 wide display are only 15 
Buttons visible. The old preview would be able to show up to 50-60 
buttons. the button size needs to be dynamic.
I'm still looking for a clever idea to directly know the corresponding 
button to an area of interest in preview. Could be a watermark with the 
image number within the preview, or multiple rows of buttons 
(corresponding the rows of images) - don't no. But there should be a 
smarter way to select multiple images than individual picking of the 
image buttons. Maybe with Shift, Control or so ...

Really straight forward would be selecting an rectangular area with the 
mouse in the preview (like zoom functions in some viewers) and only the 
'touched' or 'fully included' images are switched to 'show' - all others 
are switched to 'don't show'. Without an option "precise zoom" this 
would do the selection of images (switch on/off) like the old viewer 
does when using the image buttons. With the option "precise zoom" 
activated this would directly start the discussed partial stitching in 
the background and come back with the result within the viewer or in an 
additional window? Sounds very userfriendly, but complicated to develop 
to me. Hopefully you thing that this is not that complicated?!

>Another feature I was thinking about, was to show differences in the preview
>window (so that it is easy to see the parts that do not merge well). Maybe
>this could be combined with some kind of a mask editor, so that duplicate
>people, cars etc can be removed easily.
>
>  
>
Sounds to me, like if this would perfectly match together with this 
"precise zoom of rectangular area" functionality?!

>I also want to finally implement the stitcher defaults, so that most people
>do not need to mess with the stitcher settings too much.
>
>ciao
>  Pablo
>  
>
best, mike