GigaPanner

HOORAY!!! It’s official. GigaPan Stitch is out of Beta and available for downloading. What’s new? SPEED SPEED SPEED!!!!! And the 360 Bug is finally fixed. Hallelujah! I’m off to the races!

Current Releases:

Windows: gigapan-1.0.0805.msi
Requirements:
Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 1GB RAM (2GB recommended)

Macintosh: gigapan-1.0.0804.dmg
Requirements:
Intel-based Macintosh OS X 10.4.9 or later 1GB RAM (2GB recommended)

Now get stitching!

Want to join a growing project? GigaPan is set to explode and is looking to beef up its staff with a couple of full time software developers. I’ve been making feature requests for months now and the current team just cannot keep up with the explosive growth of the website. The team sees the huge opportunity for growth and is now looking for a few good programmers. There are two job postings I’m aware of:

• Full-time software engineers to join the core development team of the website
  and the panorama stitching application
• Geospatial Software Architect

Here are some of the skills they’re seeking:

GigaPan web site skills:
Strong web development background
Django experience is strongly preferred
Javascript, DOM, AJAX, database and Linux experience
PHP, Actionscript 2.0 / 3.0 and Flash experience is a plus
JSON-based Web API use/design (GData, Maps etc.)
Software QA processes

GigaPan stitching and image processing software:
Strong C++ experience
Comfort with mathematics and image processing
MacOS and Windows development experience
Qt user interface experience is a plus
Software QA processes

The upside is huge. GigaPan is marketing an affordable system that turns consumer digital cameras into Gigapixel capable devices! The project is committed to open standards and working hard to realize the full promise of these remarkable images.

Send your CV to illah@cmu.edu and randy.sargent@west.cmu.edu. Please help them out if you can!

Scott Telstad, a man who really knows how to make GigaPan Stitcher and Photoshop work together (as evidenced by this before and after pair of GigaPans), has just released three new tutorials on Screencast.com. The first is an introduction to the use of the GigaPan Stitcher with an eye toward fixing up the resulting GigaPan in Photoshop. The second covers the basics of how to use Photoshop to clean up motion artifacts that inevitably occur when subjects move between camera shots. The third adds detail about special circumstances such as when you need to make very detailed corrections or corrections involving multiple projected images.

The second two videos were a revelation to me. If one is willing to put in the work, gigapixel images can be cleaned up down to practically the pixel level using the tools in Photoshop. While I’m not likely to go back and clean up lots of my GigaPans that are already posted, it sure is nice to know how to avoid motion blurs and mis-stitches in the future.