Panorama Software - Panoweaver 5.00 Smartblend Plugin

In order to compensate the defect of panorama suffering from parallax problems resulting from shooting, Easypano adopts Smartblend as its plugin to get a more satifying result. Panoweaver 5.00 will have its own blender before long.

Smartlend, written by Andrew Mihal, is an application for seamless images blending, which can be downloaded here.

Let's take a look at what Smartblend can help you in Panoweaver 5.00. The followings are the full circular images I took with different exposures:

The first panorama stitched with Panoweaver 5.00 without using Smartlend and the second with it.

It is obviously that the panorama stitched with the conbination of Panoweaver 5.00 and Smartblend has resolved the parallax problem from shooting. In fact, you don't need to use Smartblend if you have no under-exposed or over-exposed problem. Panoweaver 5.00 itself can stitch images into a desirable panorama as you want.

About how to use Smartblend in Panoweaver 5.00:

After you have downloaded Smartblend, save the files in a directory. In Panoweaver 5.00, you should do as followings:

• go to Tools/Advanced Settings/Plugins;
• choose the place you save smartblend.exe;
• input the parameters in Command Line Parameters;
• check Use this as default blender.

I use -MinSize 2 -TSmooth 8 -WrapMode 1 in Command Line Parameters to stitch above images. You can refer to readme.txt accompanying with Smartblend and choose the parameters which are suitable to your images.

Note: there will be also no good if there will be margin between yellow circle and overlap area when you are adjusting the radius of that circle in Panoweaver 5.00. You will also fail to stitch images correctly if you have imported the incorrect address of smartblend.exe and typed into the wrong Command Line Parameters.