Manual photo alignment in Standard edition

[tksharpless]

I have no budget for the Pro level Photoscan, nor do I need its many georeferencing features.  But I do think I deserve a chance to manually correct the situation when the automatic photo alignment fails. This is not uncommon in my experience on photos whose overlap, and visible features, I would judge as more than adequate for panorama stitching (which is my primary occupation and interest).   Even a very primitive way to guide the s/w to a valid alignment -- such as pointing out which edges of 2 images overlap -- would probably be enough; in other words the solution need not involve your "marker" system, use of which seems to be limited to Pro version.   Autodesk 'Photo on Recap 360' allows such manual "stitching" at the low-cost level, and I think Agisoft should also.

[Marcel]

Personally I seldom have cameras that fail to align, could you show an example of a scan that gives you trouble?

From information I read in another thread, manual alignment is not very useful at the moment. No Sparse Cloud points are generated, and this means the manually aligned cameras are not processed during the Dense Cloud reconstruction. Although if your work is making panoramas then it might still be useful (I am not sure if the manually aligned cameras are used during the texture generation process).

Have you ever tried the panorama stitching program PTGui?

[a3d]

I must add a BIG PLUS to this and even in standard edition it should be a must.
In many situations if photoscan have trouble to align and you
dont have chance to take photos again , you are screwed.

IMHO its not really "bonus feature", since aligning is already something program does automatically, and placing markers yourself just helps this process in case app is confused.

[David Cockey]

I've found "Reset Camera Alignment" and "Align Selected Photos" to be very useful for photos which do not initially align or align incorrectly. After initial alignment right click on a photo thumbnail to open the menu with those commands. Frequently but not always a photo will align correctly when these are used. Also, I've had sets of photos which did not completely align with Accuracy set to Low or Medium align with Accuracy set to Medium or High.

Also, occasionally photos which won't align with Pair Preselection enabled will align with it disabled.

[David Cockey]

Photos for PhotoScan have fundamentally different requirements than photos for panoramic stitching software such as PTgui.   Photos whose overlap and visible features are more than adequate for panorama stitching may not be suitable for PhotoScan

1. Photos for PhotoScan need to be taken from different positions. PhotoScan won't work if the photos are taken from the same location.

Panoramic stitching needs photos taken from the same location.

2. Parts of an object which are to be modeled in PhotoScan needs to appear in a minimum of two photos taken from different positions, and photos taken from three or more positions are much better. This means for a single row of photos an overlap of at least 50% is needed, and overlap of ore than 67% is preferred.

Panoramic stitch only needs enough overlap to align the photos relative to each other. 20% is typically desirable but I've stitched photos with less overlap into panoramas.

3. In general PhotoScan needs photos with more "texture" than panoramic stitching software.

[MrDavidPeters]

I must agree with the original post - I do think it's a bit off that Agisoft have reserved markers for the Pro version.

It's true: I'm only new to the software and may yet find a suitable work-around.. Or simply take better photos in future!

But having the option to manually assist the software with alignment does strike me as fundamental and not a 'pro' feature.. I got properly grumpy having just bought the software only to immediately hit this roadblock.

This issue seems particularly applicable to beginners who a) may not immediately produce ideal photo sets (and therefore have greater need to make corrections) and b) have no need for the various additional features offered as part of Pro.

[VAdee]

I'm totally agree - markers should be in the Standard Edition too. This is not really a pro- more like a life-quality feature in my opinion and it would be very nice to see it in the Standard Edition.