I’m in a picture sharing mood today. I’ll most likely be posting more images sometime tonight. (Got a flower photo shoot this afternoon.)

A few years back I stumbled unknowingly into Panoramic Photography. When I first started stitching images together on my computer I was using Photoshop CS1, and blending the images by hand. (Photoshop CS1 did not to a very good job of merging photos and I didn’t even know that it did that back then.) As I continued to take panoramic photos I started looking into other options. There were several comercially available tools on the market, but I was looking for something free. I found a program called Hugin which ran cross platform and did a pretty good job of stitching photos together.

Hugin allowed for the creation of control points and after setting control points up it would merge and blend the photos nicely for me. The problem was that I had to go through and create the control points by hand. Eventually I was able to get my computer to auto choose control points and merge the photo for me, but because of the buggy nature of Hugin it required me to start in Hugin .7, save the control points and then open the file in Hugin .6 and merge them with that program. This was quite a pain.

When I got my Digital Rebel, it came with software to create panoramic photos. I tested it out, but it had a clunky interface and worked rather slowly so I never really got into using it much.

Then Photoshop CS3 came out. Out of curiosity one day I tested out the Photo Merge tool and was amazed at how well it merged the photos together. It was doing a great job. Whereas CS1 lined the photos up and did a gradient fade between the photos, CS3 actually cut lines along the photos and merged them together. The beauty of this is that the break between photos would usually be at a point where two colors meet and your eye would naturally expect there to be a change in color. This made panoramic making much easier.

It did not make things perfect, though. Photoshop still left me with some color issues and with lines that didn’t quite meet up how I expected them too. So I had to go through some touch-up work when I was done. Which was perfectly fine by me, as long as I didn’t have to spend hours clicking on areas that I wanted to make into control points.

Over the past two years or so I have taken two to three hundred panoramic photos and am slowly working on stitching them together and making them perfect, but even with Photoshop doing most of the work, it’s a long drawn out process.

But then I just ran across a post about DoubleTake. I had never heard about DoubleTake, but it turns out it’s a tool for merging photos to make panoramics. DoubleTake runs for $25 and claims to be a drag and drop perfect panorama tool.

Prompted by curiosity I decided to give DoubleTake and Photoshop a head to head test match.

Before I begin, I have to make a few things clear. Comparing DoubleTake to Photoshop is not a fair comparison. It’s kinda like comparing a cruise ship to a canoe. Sure, they both float and you can ride in either of them but one is bigger and going to do a better job when the seas get rough. The main reason I did this experiment was for fun. There was nothing scientific about this experiment.

For my tests I used my G4 PowerBook computer, with two gig of ram. I used a small little program called “FreezeFrame” to stop all processes on my computer that were not essential so the programs could use as much of my processor as they deemed fit. For each photo I took time measurements with a stop watch and have the image results from both programs. (Although I shrunk them all down for the web.) (As an important side note, when I merged the photos in Photoshop I forgot to merge the layers before I shrunk the photo down to size. As a result there are thin cracks seen along the photos where the images met together. I thought that it might go away when I saved it, but because I didn’t flatten the image first the lines stayed. So the lines are my own fault and not that of Photoshop.) Also, both programs I took “as is” I did not use any advanced techniques to tweak the images, I let the programs to all the work.

I wanted to push both of these programs to their limits, without wasting too much of my time. So the first task I threw at them was a 17 image panoramic photo of Quebec city. I quickly found out that DoubleTake only merges photos horizontally or vertically, not both. DoubleTake finished the task in 46 seconds but produced in image that looked like this:

Photoshop on the other hand, took a whopping 34 minutes and 45 seconds to churn away at the image but produced a more accurate result like so:

I figured I best stick to only horizontal images for my next tests and decided that I would take a smaller 5 photo image. DoubleTake zipped through this image in 19 seconds. However, it didn’t like the overlap of the photo and gave me a duplicate mountain:

Photoshop took 3 minutes and 48 seconds to produce a more accurate photo as such:

My next task for them included a photo of 8 images where the exposure changed from image to image. I wanted to see if DoubleTake recognized this on it’s own and tried to fix it. Sadly, it did not. In 35 seconds it cranked out this image:

Photoshop noticed the issue and 5 minutes and 32 seconds later it came up with this for a solution:

At this point I felt that I needed to give DoubleTake a fair chance. DoubleTake’s target market is not for professional or semi-professional photographers who take panoramics for a living. It’s a consumer grade product, wonderfully priced and very easy to use. It’s for the casual person who every now and then has a photograph or two that they need to merge to make a bigger picture. So I grabbed what I called a “neat” panoramic photo.

Two images, side by side of a sunset. Good overlap, not much movement in camera, color and exposure good throughout. Overjoyed with the opportunity, DoubleTake jumped right in and 5 seconds later it had created a nice little photo like this:

Photoshop took 39 seconds to create this image:

If I were to crop these last two and put them side by side, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Now, only after all of this, I went and looked at the interface and options that DoubleTake has to offer. Unfortunately, DoubleTake’s method of merging the photos is a gradient blend, which isn’t bad if things are lined up nicely, but what will sometimes happen is that things won’t be lined up nicely and there will be half faded ghost-like items in the image. You can control where the gradient is though, and the extra control can be very helpful. Also, there are options to adjust the exposure and color on each individual image, so if one photo is over exposed, it can easily be fixed and the panoramic can be saved.

The interface allows for a few other options on setting the geometry, lens focal length and all that fun stuff, which makes this a very useful tool if you just want to make some simple panoramics from time to time.

For people who don’t have access to Photoshop, this is probably a pretty good deal. It’s cheaper then other blending programs (that I know of) and it’s very easy to use. For those who have Photoshop or at least have access to it, it does a better job at blending in tough situations but there is a performance penalty when it comes to time.

Neither program is absolutely perfect, Photoshop has trouble when it tries to line up the water going over the falls at Niagra, if you didn’t notice the big jump on the horizon scroll up and give it a look. It would definitely need some touch up.

I can’t say that one program is “better” then the other simply because these are two completely different programs targeted towards two completely different groups of people. However, if you are planning on doing panoramics on a large scale, Photoshop is probably the way to go. Otherwise, DoubleTake does a pretty good job.