The Right Tool

You might be wondering why I've not posted anything new from the trip to the O RO Ranch in the past couple of days. There are several reasons.

Over the weekend, I bought 4 new doors to replace the same number upstairs in my house. The house came with ugly, unpainted luan doors - just flat, plain, boring doors. The front door, however, is in a colonial-paneled style - much nicer. I replaced the closet door in the living room to match (it's right by the front door - the dissimilarity was jarring) a while back and have planned ever since to do the rest of the doors upstairs. Tracy and I worked on those over the weekend: I cut holes for the door handles while she counter-sunk the hinges for me - with a chisel, since I don't have a router. All well and good; time consuming, but not difficult.

But the frames aren't true anymore: the house has settled since it was built. I planned on that, and bought a sander so I could sand down the doors and make them fit. What I didn't plan on was how much reshaping I'd have to do: the closet door mostly fit - I was able to do that bit of sanding by hand. But some of these doors (or frames, really) need more than a millimeter of adjustment. With the little 1/4 sheet sander I got and 60-grit sandpaper, that doesn't seem to be possible: I've sanded for over an hour on one of the better fitting doors (the door to my room) and it still doesn't fit. I just don't have the right tool.

Fortunately, Tracy's dad is going to loan me a 21-inch belt sander. That ought to do the trick and will be easier to use (for me) than a table saw (which I neither have nor know how to use).

The other reason for the delay stems from my frustration in assembling nice panoramas to post and discuss. I did the Monkeytown panorama by hand, in Photoshop. It looks good, but it was time consuming. Spending that amount of time assembling 2 photos isn't too bad; some of my panoramas have 10 photos. Lining all of those up would take serious time.

Canon has software that'll automate the merger (PhotoStitch). It's easy to use and fast. But it's not terribly good at lining things up. Decent, but not great. And it doesn't let you tweak its merger after (or before) it does its thing. What's more, on my Hackintosh, it fails with an OS error whenever it tries to save anything. Frustrating.

Photoshop offers a more powerful automated merging solution. It lets you do more work tweaking the setup and even tries (and typically fails, in my experience) to figure out in what order and how the photos should line up. Even when it fails to line them up, you can hold its hand and show it how it ought to align the photos. It's harder to use, is very, very slow, but produces better results. Better, but still not great - I can achieve much better doing it by hand (sadly!).

The crux of the problem, though, is this: I want the output as a photo, sure; but what I really want is a QuickTime VR. That's how you really want to look at a panorama - especially those as wide as some of the ones I've taken. But Photoshop won't make them, QuickTime Pro won't let me make them, and the authoring software I demoed I can't make heads or tails of: when I tried to use it, the result was a panorama that was really bad looking, like I'd zoomed way out, or something. Canon's software will make them, but it won't let me import an already-pieced-together panorama for conversion to QuickTime VR (it complains that the aspect ratio is too great - you're limited to 10:1).

Okay, I thought, I'll just chop up the tiff I exported from Photoshop and have the Canon stuff use that. Nope. Even though the images were perfect for merging, PhotoStitch managed to botch it. Can't figure out why, but it did.

Again - I don't seem to have the right tool (or tools).

My current plan is this: manually merge the photos in Photoshop so that I can ensure they're correctly lined up and look as good as possible (I shot them all with a polarizer (a big mistake) so all of them have an annoying luminance gradient I have to deal with). Then, chop them into pieces. At the edge of each of the pieces, I'll attach a large grid or target or something of the sort that should make it dead obvious for the Canon software how the photos fit together. Then I'll use PhotoStitch to export a QuickTime VR. It'll be a pain, but I'm hoping for good results.

And, hopefully, in a couple of days you'll find some high-quality panoramas of the ranch on here to explore.