16 bit Panoramas

Sat, Aug 28, 2004

I've polished up my pano building tool so that it now works with large 16 bit panoramas. 

To recap from last episodePTAssembler and PanoTools are really cool but there are some bugs in PanoTools that prevent it from working with really large images or 16 bit images.  The first is that PanoTools outputs tiff images that use packbits compression.  For some reason Photoshop chokes when loading these files.  The second issue is that PanoTools doesn't know how to create 16 bit photoshop files with layers as photoshop didn't do 16 bit layers when it was written.  I've worked around this with my latest version of PanoTiffToPSD.

It does the following:

  1. Optionally uses libtiff to reencode a set of tiff images with no compression.  To save disk space, you can choose to overwrite the original images or do the conversion and leave the original images alone.  The converted version will be deleted after being used by photoshop.
  2. Loads up each of the tiff files and drives Photoshop (via IDispatch COM interfaces for you dorks out there) to load up each file and move it to a layer in a new image.

Check it out here: Binaries, Source and License (it's free).  It is written in C# and requires the .Net Runtime.  That is available at windowsupdate.