Panos - ICE vs CS5

[rogleale]

If you sometimes put out panoramas you really should try Microft's ICE, (Image Composite Editor), it is free, small 3.19 MB, and very rapid. I shot five hand held pictures just to set up a test between CS5's Photo Merge, and MS ICE.

With Bridge running I selected the five NEF images to merge, passed them to CS5, then Photomerge and ran it. After 2 mins 30 secs CS5 produced this tiff:



I then opened ICE, dragged the five NEF's into its window and waited. 15 secs later ICE produced this JPEG:



No adjustments were made to the images, Photomerge used the default settings, and ICE did an auto-crop. Have to say that I have a fairly fast machine with a Phenom ll x 4, but the difference in speed is impressive, and the ICE output is a usable jpeg.

All just for interest.

Roger

[Ian]

Re: Panos - ICE vs CS5

ICE certainly looks interesting. The Photomerge result is poor, but you have used a mode that is not the same as the ICE one and Photomerge can produce the same type of perspective as your ICE result, although you would probably need to crop the curved edges off. There is a big colour difference too, which is odd?

Ian

[rogleale]

Re: Panos - ICE vs CS5

I did say Ian that I had left the Photomerge settings at default, but you are right of course, a better result is got by going to 'Cylindrical' for the merge. I attach one done this way to be fair! ICE scores by its speed and simplicity of use, the only selection really necessary, after choosing the images, is to auto-crop or not.
The colour difference is because NEFs opened in CS5 pass through ACR I think, and the ICE images have had no needed changes made to them.






Roger

[Ian]

Re: Panos - ICE vs CS5

Yes, there is more of a wobble on the horizon with the Photomerge result, although I think I prefer the colour on that one.

Ian

[Graham_of_Rainham]

Re: Panos - ICE vs CS5

This is interesting. I tried a 360 pano with 12 images. My 8 year old Dell Latitude with PSE4 took 35 minutes to put them all togeather in the preview then ran out of memory on the merge

I'll give ICE a go...


Yes I know I must get a new computer

[rogleale]

Re: Panos - ICE vs CS5

Let us know how it goes Graham. I've been playing a lot with ICE just to see how it compares with Photomerge, which I find is more consistent in its results.
I think that ICE, because of its speed and simplicity, will tempt a lot of people who don't have Photoshop, and have been put off by the complexity of things like Panotools or PT Assembler, into trying panoramas.
On the other hand, with a panorama which Photomerge can't handle,or has problems with, ICE could be useful because of the possibility of opening the pano into Photoshop as layers for auto-align and auto-blend.

Roger