don@donsmaps.com

Thanks for your response. There is plenty of overlap, and good detail in the original photos, given the low ambient light. You can see the results of using Panorama Maker 5 at the link below, each of the photos consists of two overlapping photos, with ***lots*** of overlap. Affinity could not do most of them. Photoshop could do a few. Panorama Maker 5 never ever spat the dummy, I always got a good stitch. http://donsmaps.com/madeleinetools.html The originals were 12 megapixels each, the stitched and (minimally) cropped panoramas are typically around 16 megapixels. the shooting tips you pointed me to are: Shooting tips Where possible, use either a tripod or fast shutter speeds to avoid motion blur; blurry subjects will produce poor results when stitching. Keep your exposure settings (shutter speed, aperture, ISO, white balance) identical between shots to produce a consistent result. Try to avoid shooting at extreme wide angles as this will introduce lens distortion. If you are using a typical zoom kit lens (eg 18-55mm), try zooming in to its maximum focal length. Always shoot from the same vantage point for best results. The photos are not able to be duplicated, I took them of cabinets of archaeological material in Europe in 2008, 2014 and 2015 and to be frank they could not be done any other way than described below. There is no way to use the same vantage point, you need the lens flat against the glass of the display cabinet to avoid glass reflections and to avoid camera shake in the (almost always) poor lighting in museums, tripods are often banned in museums, (visitors trip over them, and they block the often narrow corridors) and flash is banned almost universally, the British Museum in London being an honourable exception. So you take a photo, move the camera down (usually) and/or sideways. Repeat. Use the lowest ISO available on the camera, 80 or 120 or whatever for best results if there is sufficient light. Compromises must often be made. Doing this you can get, for example, excellent photos at very high pixel counts of a lengthy object like an Egyptian mummy sarcophagus. . If you took from the same vantage point, which I agree is what you should do when taking a panorama of a scene (stand in the one spot, keep the horizon in the middle of the frame, rotate, leave plenty of overlap, better yet use a tripod) you would get totally unacceptable reflections from the glass, and poor comparative size rendition of the stone tools at the ends of the panorama. I've done the tripod thingy when taking 360 degree panoramas inside churches and so on, where you can then get a file which allows you to swing around to look at various parts and zoom in or out at will. What I am saying is that other programs are able to stitch the photos I have taken from museums with no problems, but Affinity usually can't. There have been no photos that Affinity could stitch, but Panorama Maker 5 could not. Thanks for your concern, but my username/email is on hundreds of my archaeology web pages, in the clear. It bounces to my gmail account. I get maybe twenty spams a day in my gmail spam folder, so it is not a problem. Gmail has a great spam filter, and it is getting better. I guess what you are saying is that affinity can't do the job. Not a problem, thanks for your time.

So, nobody knows the answer to my question?

------I think you might agree that an old thread in the 'News and Information' subforum is not the best place to post a question or a bug report----- Thanks for the warm welcome. A link to the correct place would have been more use than that snarky comment. I have now found what I hope is the correct place to ask that question, a topic/thread labelled 'stitching'.

I have tried to use Affinity for creating a new panorama, and it often does not work, the images are not able to be stitched by affinity. Occasionally it works, but more often than not it does not. Yet when I use Panorama Maker 5, it stitches just fine. Even Photoshop will often work to create a panorama when Affinity does not. Is there some way of setting the hot spots for stitching so that Affinity has a better chance of stitching the photos? Don

I am not sure if this is the right place to post questions/bugs, but here goes: I have tried to use Affinity for creating a new panorama, and it often does not work, the images are not able to be stitched by affinity. Occasionally it works, but more often than not it does not. Yet when I use Panorama Maker 5, it stitches just fine. Is there some way of setting the hot spots for stitching so that Affinity has a better chance of stitching the photos? Don

There needs to be a huge number of tutorial videos on Affinity. The ones we have are valuable, but there need to be a lot more, for newbies who haven't got a clue, like me. There are lots on Photoshop, as you would expect. I guess it takes time to build the infrastructure.

Spoke too soon. Somebody got six fingers. Is there a way to tell the program which are the places to match up, as there are in other stitching programs? Sort of like little tags labelled from one to three (or four) on the overlap? Or is there some other way of doing much the same thing?

I tried the stitching program on a VERY problematic stitching/panorama task, one that other stitching programs spat the dummy on, and it came through flawlessly. The algorithm is great.

Great, it works. I don't even need two identical photos, I only need one. Just save as a tiff, then add the exact same file twice to the panorama dialog box. stitch, click on the inpaint tool, then apply, et voila! It is inpainted. Woohoo! Can't get the cropping thing to work, but that doesn't matter. I am stoked. This will save me so much time stuffing around in photoshop.

Gday Dale I watched that video again, and you are quite right. I'll try that out and see how I go. Thanks very much. I am also going to experiment with using the automatic inpaint for single photos that need infilling. I do a lot of warping and rotating of archaeological images, and wind up with a similar situation to the panorama situation, with bits and pieces not filled in around the outsides. I might save two versions, call them a.tiff and b.tiff, of exactly the same image, then try stitching the identical photos together, then use the automatic infill tool. If that works it would be a huge timesaver for me. Or maybe there is a more direct method? Don

AHA!!!!! FIRST you click on the inpainting tool at the top of the panorama. THEN you click apply. Now it works, thanks very much. Don

I started again. I added the two images, and clicked stitch panorama. It did this, and a little thumbnail with the stitched image appeared. My only option at that point was OK, which I clicked. A full size image showed, with the inpainting tool at the top of the menu bar. (I had had that selected before starting the process) I clicked apply, and nothing happened. The areas around the panorama were not inpainted. However the inpainting tool disappeared from above the image, and reappeared at the menu on the side. A range of other icons appeared at the top of the image. Did I miss some step, or do something else wrong? Thanks very much for your help Don

In the video of stitching panoramas, the presenter used the crop tool, then clicked the inpainting brush tool, then 'apply' and it automatically filled in the missing areas around the panorama. When I do that, the 'apply' button disappears, I do not know how to make that magic happen. Don

Thanks Matt, it is now downloaded. For the benefit of others, I turned off my firewall, (little snitch), turned off my vpn, (Witopia) then restarted. Then logged into icloud when it popped up unbidden, which requires the apple ID and password. Then went to the app store, logged in again, then found affinity photo, and was able to buy it and download it after giving my apple ID and password yet again! Now I just have to learn how to stitch photos with it, I'll have to find a tutorial somewhere. Thanks for your help, much appreciated. Don

To the sales team: Is there some way I can buy affinity photo directly from you without going through the App Store? The App Store accepts my ID and password, in the sense that it does not reject it, as it does when I type in the wrong password, but I've had a 'Sign in to download from the App Store' small window, with a spinning gif for twenty minutes now. I don't think I am getting in any time soon. all I want to do is buy the app! Don

I just altered and cropped a photo and saved in the native file format for Affinity. When I opened the file in Graphics Converter 9 to save for the web, the crop had disappeared. Do I have to export as a tiff or something? Don