If the Stencil Tool doesn’t correct your problem, you can export the rendered file to Photoshop using the Photoshop export function.  When exported in a PSD format, each of the original images is rendered to its own layer in the Photoshop file, each with a mask for each shape that represents the areas that overlap.

When the file is opened in Adobe Photoshop, it is a simple matter of adjusting the transparency of the mask or painting out the problem spot to fix the image.

Stitcher 4.0 has also added the ability to preview all of your renders to see what the final output will look like.  This is especially handy with QTVRs as you don’t have to wait for the file to render to discover mistakes, or problems with the files.  Simply put, the Preview Render is a time saver.

When working with images or QTVRs for the web, what good are they if you don’t have additional interactivity built in?  Sure it is great to have a QuickTime VR of your shop so visitors to your site can browse around and see what you have to offer, but if they can’t click on an item to launch a popup to find more info, the QuickTime VR portion of your site becomes a nice addition, but lacks practicality.  In the past you would have had to go to another application to add this feature, but now Stitcher 4.0 allows you to create these Hotspots inside the program.

Online Real Estate brokers should love this new feature.  If you are selling a house, this makes it convenient in creating a tour of the home.  The hotspots in the files can link to other QTVR files, websites, ftp sites, or even to a mail program (mailto:).  With this handy feature, creating a truly interactive environment is a few short clicks away.

The significant improvements to the panorama and QTVR portions of Stitcher are great and play a role in the rendering of spherical, cylindrical, and cubic image maps for use in 3D environments that can be created in programs like NewTek’s LightWave 3D, discreet’s 3ds max, and Adobe After Effects.  I have used Stitcher Cubic Maps a number of times when rendering 3D environments in After Effects, and the spherical maps created have been used as both background plates and image maps in LightWave 7.5.

While there have been significant improvements in the latest version of Stitcher, there are still a few flaws that need to be pointed out.  Stitcher does an excellent job of finding edges and common areas to stitch from one image to the next, but in some cases it still has difficulty with images that are similar.  The best example of this is when you are photographing the ground.  While grass and dirt clumps may make the images different from one another, and while your eye can easily see where the images should match up, Stitcher 4.0 still stumbles and refuses to auto stitch.  Future versions should address this issue, as many QuickTime VRs, spherical image maps, and the like will need to be created quickly for film, video, web, and virtual reality use.

The second problem I see with Stitcher 4.0 is in how it slows down dramatically when image sizes and file sizes get to big.  Even though I am running Stitcher 4.0 on a 2.7Ghz PC and a dual Gig Mac G4, each with plenty of RAM, the program tends to crawl when I am using high rez (1600X1200) uncompressed images.  For users in a 3D or film post house environment, this slow down could increase the cost of production.  A future version of Stitcher will need to address this.  A couple ways this could be done is by automatically generating a smaller reference file when images are imported, or by taking a cue from other applications and integrating some type of shared network processing.

These two problems aside, REALVIZ’s Stitcher 4.0 is a terrific product.  Powerful in the way it calculates and stitches images together, and versatile in its output, every form of digital creation from high end 3D to web design to print will benefit from having Stitcher 4.0 as an application in their production toolbox.  I give Stitcher 4.0 a Must Have Recommendation.

Stitcher 4.0 is available now from REALVIZ (www.realviz.com) for both the PC and MAC platforms.   

---Stephen Schleicher