Gradually I've got into a routine with my weekly panoramic photos of the garden ( house photos ), so clearly it's time to change things. My routine involves taking the partial images in raw format, converting them to JPEG with DxO Optics Pro , and then stitching them with Hugin. But today it occurred to me that it doesn't make sense to use JPEG for the intermediate steps: both DxO and Hugin understand TIFF, so I should convert my intermediate images to TIFF.
The results remind me of the adage: for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant ... and wrong. In any case, a seemingly simple modification brought untold pain with itself. The first, still relatively benign, appears to be that DxO emits invalid TIFF filesor maybe they just use features that other software, notably including libtiff, doesn't understand:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/19) ~/Photos/20120811 44 -> convert 169-Ferrers-road.tif foo.jpeg
20120811: Unknown field with tag 50341 (0xc4a5) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Unknown field with tag 53248 (0xd000) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Wrong data type 3 for "PixelXDimension"; tag ignored. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Wrong data type 3 for "PixelYDimension"; tag ignored. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Incompatible type for "FileSource"; tag ignored. `TIFFFetchNormalTag' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Wrong data type 3 for "GainControl"; tag ignored. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Unknown field with tag 42033 (0xa431) encountered. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Unknown field with tag 42036 (0xa434) encountered. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Unknown field with tag 42037 (0xa435) encountered. `TIFFReadCustomDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Unknown field with tag 50341 (0xc4a5) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
20120811: Unknown field with tag 53248 (0xd000) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ warning/tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/768.
Apart from the mess on the screen, this doesn't seem to have done much harm. But other programs, notably xv, got really upset, producing a series of pop-up error messages that followed the cursor and stopped me from getting any work done.
The first panorama (the complicated verandah one) worked relatively well, though it seemed that the raw conversion wasn't as good as with JPEG output. That will have to wait until I have processed all the images. But then my own scripts came to bite me, and I managed to accidentally delete some images several times, not speeding up the processing. While I was doing that, continued with some other panoramas. The preview of the north view panorama was surprising:
The first thing to hit me was that the 360° panorama didn't close. That proved to be due to complete lack of control points between the adjacent images at each end. It wasn't until some time later that I discovered that the arch in front of the house (about half right in this image) was missing: the alignment had caused it to be hidden. And the choice of control points between those two images made the problem clear:
Despite the presence of lots of common features, all of the control points had been found in the amorphous sky above.
Apart from that, it's clear that processing TIFFs is slower. After all, they're 70 MB each; over the 100 Mb/s link I have between braindeath and eureka, that's nearly 7 seconds per image, and the panoramas required up to 40 images. So it's not surprising that that was about all I had time for today. What a mess!