Artifacts, Exposure Balancing, and Color Management
General discussion
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This post is to share my experiences with a couple recent projects in ICE 2.0.3.0 (64-bit). In short I am seeing three problems.1) ICE creating artifacts (for lack of a better word) during the stitch, 2) ICE seeming to shift exposure values across the stitch, and 3) Color management, or color shifts occurring in the stitch.
I would be happy to share any information that is pertinent about equipment, my capture process, raw conversion, and ICE import/stitch process.
Creating Artifacts: Never did I see older versions of MICE create 'artifacts' during the stitch process. I've marked the artifacts below with arrows and ovals. The arrows are pointing to small, rectangular, de-saturated shapes that appear in the final stitch. The ovals surround diagonal streaks of moderately de-saturated streaks in the grass. All artifacts seem to reoccur at somewhat regular intervals across the image. The second image is a 1:1 crop of both areas.
Exposure Blending and Color Management: I always thought one of the better qualities of MICE was its ability to blend exposures (if needed), and the new ICE claims to have automatic exposure blending. What I find really frustrating about this problem is all of my original exposures (straight from the camera) were matched exposures to begin with - I am quite meticulous in that matter. Furthermore, I ensure all exposures have matching exposure value and white balance through my raw conversion. This stitch was created using 29 portrait-oriented frames with well over 50% overlap. The arrows in this image show panels that seem to occur in the stitch where the exposures in each panel vary from left to right. Again, these panels seem to occur at regular intervals and are sized relatively the same. The apparent size of these panels do not, in any way, correspond with the overlap of the images I imported into ICE. Additionally, the blues in the sky in each of the lighter panels is way off.
I sincerely hope to continue using ICE for my panoramic projects and would greatly appreciate any input that anyone may have on these issues.
Regards,
Kevin Childress
kdcphoto.com
