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Can Affinity Photo merge several photos?


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Hi community,
I have a couple of photos (RAWs) that I want to merge in order to receive a 360° Panoramic shot. Can I do this with Affinity Photo or do I have to buy additional software? If I can do it with Affinity Photo: could someone post a link to a tutorial? That would be great!

If not I guess that I will have to buy some software. I did a test with the free version of Panorama Stitcher (Panorama Stitcher Mini/ at panoramastitcher.com) that was quite convinving. But maybe somebody knows even better solutions that are available for the Mac and can be integrated easily into the workflow of Affinity Photo.

Thank you!
Raphael

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thank you all. What I saw in the built in possibility was really very interesting. Unfortunately my Mac does not really work very well with the big pictures that are created by that tool. What I found out is that I usually take 60 - 80 pictures and that the result is then 20.000px x 15.000px. That are of course only estimations.

Anyway I have to buy a new machine and now I need to know which one. I would like to know if a MaccbookPro with 13" and 24GB RAM and the new M2 chip might be enough. They are not that much expensive than the new 14" books.I am using an external screen anyway. Thzerefore the size of the book is not very important. My concerns are rather about the RAM and the chip.

Has anybody experiance with that kind of question?
Thanks
Raphael

 

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Affinity can handle very large images 

see 

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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The problem is not Affinity, but my machine. It is definitely not strong enough to work with pictures of that size. Therefore I want to by a new Mac and I need people who have experiences with modern Macs and working with very big images on these machines. My question is which machine to choose.

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If money does not matter: Mac Studio with as much RAM as you can afford. Big and fast internal SSD will help (>= 1 TB, smaller ssd are slower)

But Affinity Apps currently are unable to utilize more than 32 (or 64) GB RAM. Never the less, more RAM helps to keep the OS and other Apps working in parallel.

M2 does not provide relevant benefits over M1 wrt Affinity wrt your intended use case.

But more important is to develop a workflow which avoids memory over utilization.

Or contact the author of the linked post to align about his specs and workflow.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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Thank you for the answer. I forgot to say that I would prefere a mobile machine. You are right, I will contact the author of the linked article. Maybe he knows more.

Now putting all facts of this thread together:

- What I have now (Macbook Air/ 16GB RAM/ M1 Chip/ 250MB SSD) is definitely not enough. (I bought it for other reasons btw)
- M1 or M2 does not make a big difference.
- I can deactivate all other programs, so the machine can concentrate on Affinity.
- Affinity does not support more than 32 MB RAM
Conclusion. If so, the best mobile choice is a MacbookPro with an M1 or M2 Chip,  32GB of RAM and a huge SSD.

The question that remains is whether the book can handle those inages or not. If not something like a Mac Studio would be necessairy. (I hope the book can do it because the Mac Studio is very expensive and not mobile. As far as I know it was created for videocutting  But pictures of 20.000px width seem to me less difficult than cutting vids.) 

Therefore it would be great if anybody who has a configuration similar to that I quoted (MacbookPro...) could tell us whether it is possible or not.


 

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If you can provide a test set of RAW images, and the target output format (RGB8 or RGB16, resolution, maybe someone will try.

How do you create 360° images? 

Do you use Panorama stitching in Photo?

Do you use HDR and RGB/32? This increases RAM stress by factor 2-4. If possible, batch process the RAW and export as RGB/8 to save memory, before stitching. Do no stitch RAWs directly!

Can you simply try the process with images scaled down 8x / 4x / 2x and post how long your workflow takes?

A bigger Mac will give you some linear boost at best depending on GPU / CPU core count, but some processing will be done in CPU only and even single core (e.g. Panorama stitching). So don’t expect to much. 

 

I would really suggest to get 64GB RAM minimum, as M1/M2 is a shared memory design, so you need several GB for OS and GPU, leaving much less to Affinity Apps (don’t know th numbers, maybe 24 GB). IF you hit the RAM limit, the slow-down will be excessive (factor 1000).

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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Yes, I do the stitching in Photo, and I use "normal" RAWs, no HDR. I could also create the images manually from RAW and use the JPGs in order to save memory. That also makes it possible to work on the pictures before exporting them.

Here you can see some examples that I did width images of 3.000px width. https://sos-alentejo.org/unterstuetzen/ The website is still in progress.

The main problem is, that we are collecting money for a ecological project. Therefore we should not spend too much money in computers. Anyway I have to biy a new Mac, but the price should not be to high. For all other work, 16GB RAM are absolutely enough. Therfore 32 - if possible - would be great. 64 GB RAM is quite expensive.

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7 hours ago, raphaelbolius said:

Anyway I have to buy a new machine and now I need to know which one. I would like to know if a MaccbookPro with 13" and 24GB RAM and the new M2 chip might be enough. They are not that much expensive than the new 14" books.I am using an external screen anyway. Thzerefore the size of the book is not very important. My concerns are rather about the RAM and the chip.

For external development projects (period time booked by other companies for their project programming) I always get the computer equipment I have to use from the related external customer companies. When I get Mac based hardware (sometimes I've to use Win hardware instead) these are mostly always 16" Macbook Pros with (32-64 GB RAM & 1 TB SSDs). They (the external customer companies) often want to send me also external 2x 24"/27" monitors together with the notebooks then, but since I have a huge wide screen from my company here flying around, I mostly tell them to not send the external monitors at all.

So from those experiences I can tell that a 14"/16" MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro CPU, 32 GB RAM & 1 TB SSD, which is then connected to an external wide screen monitor, keyboard & mouse, would be a good general base system. - But sometimes (in my case) when you're dealing with a bunch of Docker containers, DBs, IntelliJ Idea with huge external Java frameworks and so on at the same time... it's even better then to have 64GB of RAM instead of 32GB, which gives you (in the Scenarios I am involved in like backend programming) then much smoother response times and more unblocked/fluid working experiences. So having enough RAM in reserve sometimes plays an important role here. -- So for huge graphics file works I would expect the same here, aka the more RAM in reverse the better!

Maybe even a MacBook Air M2 with 24 GB & 1-2 TB SSD would do it, though since there isn't any active cooling in that hardware wise when stressed it probably will throttle down much earlier here than a MacBook Pro in overall performance. - On the other pro side though with a MBA you could enjoy the silence then instead.

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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51 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Maybe even a MacBook Air M2 with 24 GB & 1-2 TB SSD would do it, though since there isn't any active cooling in that hardware wise when stressed it probably will throttle down much earlier here than a MacBook Pro in overall performance. - On the other pro side though with a MBA you could enjoy the silence then instead.

 

Thanks for the answer. MB Air, M2, 24GB RAM I guess is not enough. I have a MB Air,  M1 and 16GB RAM, and it is definitely not enough. I think, that the MB Pro and at least 32GB of RAM should be the minimum. But that is what I want to find out. 32GB or 64GB? ;) But thank you for your experiance.

 

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15 hours ago, raphaelbolius said:

MB Air, M2, 24GB RAM I guess is not enough. I have a MB Air,  M1 and 16GB RAM, and it is definitely not enough. I think, that the MB Pro and at least 32GB of RAM should be the minimum. But that is what I want to find out. 32GB or 64GB?

I think the best would be, if you had the opportunity to somewhere test first out, if a MBP with 32 GB RAM would be memory wise capable to do the job or not. So you haven't unnecessarily to buy maybe a wrong memory size equipped one.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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On 10/4/2022 at 2:10 AM, raphaelbolius said:

Hi community,
I have a couple of photos (RAWs) that I want to merge in order to receive a 360° Panoramic shot. Can I do this with Affinity Photo or do I have to buy additional software? If I can do it with Affinity Photo: could someone post a link to a tutorial? That would be great!

If not I guess that I will have to buy some software. I did a test with the free version of Panorama Stitcher (Panorama Stitcher Mini/ at panoramastitcher.com) that was quite convinving. But maybe somebody knows even better solutions that are available for the Mac and can be integrated easily into the workflow of Affinity Photo.

Thank you!
Raphael

Hi Raphael. I have been stitching large images for many years, typically 3Gpx from my drone and 5Gpx or more from my SonyA7R4.

Honestly, Photoshop and Affinity are not well suited to stitching large panoramas, especially not full spherical panos.

They'll do OK with a few image frames with lots of overlap, but the problem is that you have no control over the process. PTGUI Pro looks at adjacent frames to find points of correspondence and creates stitching points. Here's an example of a drone aerial, drone DJI Mini3Pro 36000x18000px = 648Mpx

image.png.c600b39876ab0ecb06cde2218a740371.png

And here you can see the seamlessly stitched panorama, which is a 360x180° view from the drone

https://www.hiddenmelbourne.com.au/camberwell-town-hall/

regds, Barney

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  • 6 months later...

Hi folks,

Trying to figure out how to get a DJI Mini 2 360 photo  ready for FB.  I loaded the photos into my iphone 7 and it did the stiching.  Transfer the stitched image on to my Mac Mini and imported it into Affinity.  When I switch on live projector -ecarectangular I am looking at a 360 image. Great. Turn off live projector and export.  But after I export it is just a flat image.  4096x2048 Jpeg.  I tried shooting jpeg RAW but my iphone gets hung up at 50% of processing.  I have also tried importing the 28 photos in to Affinity and selecting new panarama but it only stiched the centre portion of the image.  Any thoughts?   Ed

 

Edited by Edward Homer
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Hi Edward

Once you have a 360x180° panorama the job is almost done. Now all that you must do is add the Sphere Metadata to the panorama and Facebook will recognise it.

This is quite a good YouTube video which shows how to capture a panorama, then use Google maps to add the metadata. 

Work through it carefully and you will have success!

Regds, Barney

 

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