3D Photo Browser 8.2 serial key or number

Before you look any further, make sure that you are running the latest version of PTGui. The current version is See the version history for possible bugs that have been fixed in recent versions. Licensed users can upgrade at a reduced price, or free of charge, depending on the date of the original license purchase.

Documentation and Tutorials

The Video Tutorial on this site should help you get started using PTGui. Tutorials for advanced usage of PTGui can be found on the Tutorials page. And the Links page contains links to more tutorials, written by users of PTGui.

Detailed documentation for every feature and parameter is included with PTGui: in PTGui choose 'Help -> Help for this tab'.

Getting support

If you have a question or problem please first check the list of frequently asked questions below. The answer to your question may already be listed here.

If this does not solve the problem, post your technical support questions to the PTGui Support Forum. You will quickly get an answer from the PTGui authors or from other users.

Contact us

For non-technical questions (e.g. related to purchasing, downloading, software activation) please contact us directly at support at ptgui dotcom. Technical support questions should be posted to the PTGui Support Forum.

Frequently asked questions

I purchased PTGui or PTGui Pro and I still haven't heard from you after a day!
I have purchased a PTGui license a couple of years ago. Do you offer discounted upgrade pricing?
I am a licensed user of PTGui; can I upgrade to PTGui Pro?
Which version should I purchase, PTGui or PTGui Pro?
Where can I find the license conditions for PTGui / PTGui Pro?
Do you offer special student pricing?
My organization needs a pro-forma invoice before we can purchase a license. Can you arrange this?
Can I still download older PTGui versions?
Can I install PTGui on both my PC and my laptop?

I tried to enter my license key, but it doesn't work
How does activation work?
My computer is not connected to internet. Can I use PTGui?
What about hardware modifications?
My computer died / was stolen. How can I deactivate my license?
How can I transfer my license to another computer?
On how many computers is my license activated?
I lost my license key
I'm planning to switch from a PC to a Mac computer, is that a problem?
We are running PTGui on multiple computers in a network environment. How can we deploy PTGui without activating each computer manually?
PTGui says 'failed to activate your license'. How can I resolve this?
Can a license be activated for all users on a computer?

Is PTGui or the documentation available in other languages?
My lens database is empty, is that normal?
Can PTGui work with bit images from start to finish (ie, no 8-bit conversion)?
Can I use PTGui to create virtual tours?
Sensor sizes: millimeters vs inches?
My images were taken with a (e.g.) 28mm lens, but after optimization, PTGui reports it as a mm lens
Can PTGui read RAW/DNG files?
Will PTGui read RAW files from camera XXX?
What does 'Apply Template' do?
Apply Template does not copy the control points from the template. Why is that?
What kind of computer hardware do you recommend for use with PTGui?
Does PTGui preserve the EXIF data of my images?
Can I stitch images from a shift lens with PTGui?
Where does PTGui store its settings?
PTGui doesn't fully use my computer's processor(s); the CPU load is less than % during stitching
After optimizing, PTGui shows me the average control point distance. What distance should I aim for?
Why does PTGui Pro close my project and open a new blank project after I press Save and Send to Batch Stitcher?
PTGui asks me whether I would like to re-initialize the project. What does this mean?
Can PTGui create those interactive photos where the camera is rotated around the object?
After stitching a project in the PTGui Pro Batch Stitcher, the project is modified!
I have edited my RAW / DNG files in Photoshop or another application. Does PTGui recognize my changes when I use the raw files in PTGui?
What can I do to reduce the stitching time PTGui on my system?
I have moved or rotated images in the Panorama Editor by hand using the Edit Individual Images mode. But PTGui tells me it needs to optimize the panorama and this undoes my changes. Why?
Can PTGui stitch greyscale images?
PTGui keeps changing the output size in the Create Panorama tab. Why?
How does PTGui calculate the optimum output size of a panorama?
Why does PTGui 11 use a different optimum size than PTGui 10?
What exactly does the Fisheye Factor parameter do?
Can I install different versions of PTGui side by side?

I am trying to edit the seams of a layered panorama in Photoshop, but I only see the bottom layer with the merged panorama; the other layers are transparent.
Another application crashes when opening TIFF files generated by PTGui, or it displays garbled images.
My computer crashes occasionally while PTGui is running
My images have a different brightness or color when viewed in PTGui
PTGui shows a message 'PTGui was unable to detect control points for some of the images, therefore you need to add a few control points by hand'. Help! What should I do now?
PTGui is randomly rotating my images!
I'm having trouble stitching my panorama. Can you help?
Norton / Symantec antivirus says there's a virus in the PTGui installer!
After editing a degree panorama in Photoshop and importing back into PTGui, I'm seeing a vertical line in the panorama
I'm getting Out of Memory errors while running PTGui
When installing on a Mac I get the error "PTGui Pro cannot be opened because the identity of the developer cannot be confirmed. macOS cannot verify that this app is free from malware."
I'm unable to open a QuickTime VR .mov panorama
I'm attempting to stitch images taken with multiple cameras but I'm running into stitching errors
My panoramas stitched using a template in the Batch Builder have misalignments. This only happens in the Batch Builder; the panorama is perfect if I use the same template in the GUI.
The Batch Builder seems to ignore the settings in my template; my panoramas come out different than expected.
The panorama in the PTGui Viewer is full of black dots!
I'm using PTGui 10; the stitching process hangs and never completes.
Panoramas published using Publish to Website are not displayed correctly using Firefox, the image is flashing.
The brightness or contrast in the Detail Viewer differs from the stitched panorama!
I'm getting an error message "These images cannot be linked because they have different dimensions. Linked images should have the same pixel dimensions." Why?

The horizon of my panorama is curved instead of straight
I get color/brightness differences between the images in my panorama
How can I change the resolution (ppi or dpi value) of the generated panorama?
I see misalignments in the stitched panorama. What can I do to improve the result?
Some control points in my project have a relatively high control point distance. Will the alignment of my panorama improve if I delete all control points with an error above a certain threshold?
My drone panoramas are showing misalignments at the horizon. How can I get a straight horizon?

My panorama contains curved lines. How do I get straight lines to remain straight in the panorama?
How do I use the Horizontal line and Vertical line control points?
How can I calibrate my lens parameters?
Does PTgui allow stitching of photos that have the camera in different locations?
How can I stitch mosaics, like partial scans from a flatbad scanner of a large image?
My panorama was taken with the camera tilted up or down. Now there's a lot of unnecessary black space above/below the panorama, increasing the size of the output. Can it be cropped away before stitching?
How can I have better control of the overlap area (i.e. the location of the seams)?
How can I create a vertical panorama? PTGui rotates my panorama 90 degrees!
I want to cover the tripod in my (x degree) spherical panorama. How do I add a nadir cap?
How can I change the default settings for new panoramas?
How can I stitch extremely large panoramas?
How can I align a set of images, all taken in the same direction (not a panorama)?
How can I use exactly the same stitching settings for different sets of images?
How can I correct a single image for lens distortion?
How can I show a panorama on my website?
How can I publish a panorama to Facebook?
Why does Facebook display my panorama as a flat image, not as an interactive panorama?
How can I use PTGui to add the metadata required by Facebook to an already stitched panorama?
How do I level/straighten a panorama using horizontal / vertical line control points?
How can I correct a single image for vignetting in PTGui Pro?
My spherical panorama still has a hole in the top and/or bottom. How do I fill the missing parts to make the panorama truly spherical?
After running Publish to Website my panorama has black holes at the top and bottom; how do I get rid of these?
PTGui leaves some blank space around my panorama. How can I crop the panorama so that it fills the canvas entirely?
How can I tell PTGui to output panoramas at a specific size?
How can I defish a fisheye image in PTGui?
How can I extract a 'flat' image from a spherical panorama?
I have taken multiple panoramas from the same viewpoint, to create a time lapse movie. How can I ensure that subsequent panoramas are aligned when played back in sequence?
My project contains one or more images without any recognizable detail and it's impossible to place control points. How can I stitch my panorama?
How can I view a finished panorama interactively on my computer?
I would like to send a panorama to a friend/client/ Is it possible to view a panorama interactively without needing to install a plugin first?
I need to align/overlay an image to an already stitched panorama. How can I do this?
How can I stitch a PTGui project from the command line?
Can I use PTGui to arrange pictures into a collage? Can I disable the warping/distorting of images?
How can I display spherical panoramas on my iPad?
How can I stitch panoramic video in PTGui?
Is there a way to stitch many panoramas using the same settings?
How can I make 'little planet' images in PTGui?
How can I stitch images from Adobe Lightroom in PTGui? Do you offer a Lightroom plugin?
Can you tell me how to make 3d (stereoscopic) panoramas in PTGui?
How can I view a stitched panorama in a Cardboard VR viewer on my phone?
How can I stitch two back-to-back circular fisheye images?
How can I retouch the nadir of a spherical panorama?
How can I stitch images taken with a ° one shot camera in PTGui?
How can I prevent PTGui from placing control points in certain areas?
We are trying to parse a PTGui .pts project file. Can you explain how the lens parameters are stored?
How can I rotate individual images? The rotation buttons in the Project Assistant tab only seem to rotate all images together.

What is the best way to take images for HDR stitching in PTGui Pro?
My images don't contain EXIF exposure information. Can I still use them to stitch HDR panoramas?
PTGui Pro doesn't recognize my bracketed exposures!
The stitched HDR panorama looks like it was not blended at all. I'm seeing hard edges between overlapping images.
So I forgot to switch my camera to M mode; my bracketed images are taken in auto exposure mode. Can I still stitch them to HDR in PTGui Pro?
Why should I use manual exposure mode? Isn't it much better to use automatic exposure, so that every image is optimally exposed?
PTGui Pro displays the wrong EV values! My images were taken at -2, 0, +2. This is confirmed by the EXIF data but PTGui shows something else in the Image Parameters tab.
What's the deal with linked images?
Should I link my bracketed exposures or not?
Can I retouch an HDR panorama, e.g. to remove ghost images of moving people?
I would like to stitch my panorama in PTGui Pro, but use another application (e.g. Photomatix or Photoshop) to create the HDR.
Can I use PTGui Pro for exposure fusing / tone mapping / HDR generation of non-panoramic images?
Can I extract artificial bracketed images from my (non bracketed) RAW files and have PTGui Pro assemble those into an HDR panorama?
I have read the previous answer but I still would like to stitch my pseudo bracketed images generated from RAW files!

Which GPUs are supported by PTGui?
Which graphics card should I buy?
Does PTGui support using multiple GPUs?
PTGui reports 'no supported GPU device available' even though my (Windows) computer has an NVIDIA GPU supporting OpenCL.

We send you your registration key as soon as possible after receipt of your payment, though this may take up to 24 hours. If you still haven't heard from us after that time, be assured that we did send you your registration key but apparently our email has not reached you. This occasionally happens, often caused by spam filter problems or full mailboxes.

If your mailbox has a Junk Mail folder, look for mail from PTGui Support <support@ptgui.com>. Many junk mail filters have a white list feature (often called 'trusted senders'); please add our address to it.

Then go to this page to get your key: Request registration key Every PTGui and PTGui Pro license comes with one year of free upgrades. After that year you can upgrade your license at by paying an upgrade fee. Your upgrade purchase will include another year of free upgrades. See Buy upgrade for more information. See Version History for what's new in the latest version. Yes, you can upgrade from PTGui to PTGui Pro by paying the current price difference. See Buy upgrade for more information. See Features of PTGui and PTGui Pro for a comparison of the two versions. Separate trial versions are available for PTGui and PTGui Pro, so you can try both. If you're not sure whether you need the Pro version, consider purchasing a license for the standard version first. If needed, you will be able to upgrade to PTGui Pro later by paying the price difference between the two versions. See: End User License Agreement No, we do not offer educational or any other kind of discounts on individual license purchases. We do offer discounted company licenses to universities and schools, please contact us for details. Yes, this is possible: Go to the Buy page at this site and press the Buy Now button of the desired product. On the subsequent page choose: Payment Method: Check (or Bank/Wire Transfer if available). After filling in your personal details you will be transferred to ShareIt's website. Complete the order forms until the order is finalized. You will be sent a pro forma invoice with payment instructions. If you later on decide to pay by credit card instead, just place a new order through our website. The wire transfer order will be canceled automatically if no payment is received within a month. Yes, several older versions of PTGui and PTGui Pro are still available. To download, go to the Download page, choose 'Download full version' and enter your registration key. On the subsequent page click on the 'older versions' link to access the latest version of PTGui for which your license is valid.

On macOS you may need to bypass Apple's security restrictions (see Q). A personal license may be installed on up to three computers, provided it is only used by the person to whom it is licensed (i.e. the name appearing in the registration key). If multiple users use PTGui on those computers, multiple personal licenses or a company license should be purchased instead.

For the company license registration keys are issued on a per machine basis: a separate registration key must be purchased for each computer on which the software is installed.

Other restrictions apply; see the End User License Agreement for details.
The license key is quite long and it is easy to make mistakes. Therefore please copy/paste the key from the original order confirmation email. Select the code and press Ctrl+C, then paste into PTGui using Ctrl+V. On mac use Cmd+C and Cmd+V instead. If you don't have the license key anymore, we can resend it to you.

The registration key and registration name are linked to each other. Be sure to enter the correct registration name: it may be different from your own name. The registration name is shown in the order confirmation email.

The manicapital.com automatic translation feature is known to corrupt the license key. If you use GMail in a language different than english, switch off automatic translation by selecting 'view this email in english' when reading the email containing the license key.

A correctly entered license key would look as follows:

When you run PTGui for the first time on your computer it will ask you for your license key. This license key together with your computer's hardware configuration is sent to our servers. Assuming the permitted total number of installations is not exceeded, we will then activate your license on this particular computer.

Subject to the conditions set forth in the End User License Agreement, a personal license may be activated on up to 3 computers, for personal use by the licensed person only. For a company license multiple license keys are issued; each key can be activated on one computer.

A computer can be deactivated via Help - License Info - Deactivate; this makes the license key available for use on another computer. To prevent abuse of the deactivation facility, PTGui must verify the activation status at least once every 30 days. This happens automatically in the background while PTGui is running. Activation happens over the internet. If the computer running PTGui is not connected to Internet, it can still be activated using another computer with internet connection. Select Activate Offline to do so. This generates a code which is to be entered on a web page. The web page returns another code which can be entered in PTGui to complete the activation. You can transfer the codes between the computers using an USB drive for example. Activation is not affected by small upgrades, like adding more memory. But larger upgrades may cause PTGui to consider the computer to be a different machine and ask for a new activation. Before performing a hardware upgrade it is therefore best to deactivate the license via Help - License Info - Deactivate. When you launch PTGui again after the upgrade, use the original license key to reactivate.

If you forgot to deactivate, you can still go to License activations to request deactivation of your old hardware. If you can no longer access the computer please go to License activations and request us to deactivate your computer. For PTGui 11 and later: On the old computer, go to Help | License Info and press Deactivate. Now the license key can be used to install PTGui on the new computer.

PTGui 10 and earlier can be deactivated by going to the About window, press Register and then press the Deactivate button. On Windows, 'About' can be found in the Help menu; on macOS it's in the 'PTGui [Pro]' menu. There are two ways to find out: in PTGui select Help - License Info. Or go to License activations and enter your license key to see the currently activated computers. No problem; we can resend your license key to you. No problem, the license is platform independent and you will be able to transfer the license to another computer. Each computer running PTGui must be activated. The activation process keeps track of the number of computers on which a PTGui license is used. Normally PTGui will ask for the license key to activate the software when it is run for the first time on a computer. This step can be bypassed by installing a provisioning file containing the license key. If such a provisioning file is present, the user does not have to enter the license key and PTGui will be activated automatically when it is run for the first time on a computer, using a license key from the provisioning file.

The provisioning file must be stored in this location on Windows computers:C:\ProgramData\PTGui\manicapital.comd here on macOS:/Users/Shared/Application Support/PTGui/manicapital.com
manicapital.com should be a JSON file with the following structure:{ "licensekeys": [ { "regname": "Registration Name", "regkey": "QjAfghfhYkk/RJd2vdcfSqYG9cxoP5s/+JGmAoqKWk%BacGWgCAQ==" }, { "regname": "Registration Name", "regkey": "MzQyQ+rtrethy9erkkhjkjkjjycGWgCAQ==" } ] }
The regname field should contain the Registration Name and the regkey field should contain the license key. The file can contain multiple license keys (2 in the above example); PTGui will attempt to activate using the keys in this order. If a key is already activated on another computer, the next key will be used, until activation is succesful.

Note that PTGui license keys consist of two lines, but strings in JSON must be represented in a single line. PTGui ignores line endings in the license key, so the two lines of the license key can simply be concatenated into a single line. You can validate the syntax of your JSON file using (e.g.) JSONLint.

If activation fails, an error message is displayed and PTGui will show the regular activation window. The provisioning file will only be used if PTGui is not yet activated. If PTGui is already activated on a particular computer, manicapital.com will be ignored.

To install PTGui on multiple Windows computers in the network you can script your deployment system to run the PTGui installer in silent mode as follows:manicapital.com /S /D=C:\Program Files\PTGuiThe installer can be run without uninstalling a previous version first.

On a Mac no installation is necessary, just copy the PTGui application bundle into the Applications folder.

A license can be deactivated on a computer as usual, through Help - License Info - Deactivate from within PTGui on the licensed computer. If this is not possible, remote deactivation can be requested by going to License activations. Be sure to remove manicapital.com after deactivation, otherwise PTGui will be reactivated automatically and silently when it is launched again.

For activation PTGui needs to be able to contact the activation server (see Q). Also, PTGui needs to be able to create and modify the file C:\ProgramData\PTGui\manicapital.com, so appropriate permissions must be given to all users running PTGui. To activate your license on your computer PTGui needs to contact the license server. This may fail if the computer is behind a corporate firewall, or if internet security software is running to block outgoing network connections.

To resolve the issue, configure your firewall to permit outgoing network connections to manicapital.com on TCP port

If this is not possible, or if your computer does not have internet access, PTGui offers an offline activation option: in the activation window press the Activate Offline button and follow the instructions. A personal license is licensed to a single person; only this person is permitted to use PTGui. For this reason a personal license is activated for a single user account on the computer only. For more information see Q

A company license is licensed per computer, and PTGui may be used by any person on that computer. Therefore the company license can be activated for all users on a computer.

To do so, ensure that all users have read and write permissions to this folder: C:\ProgramData\PTGui\ (Windows) or /Users/Shared/Application Support/PTGui/ (macOS). Activation data will be stored in a file named manicapital.com in this folder. When activating PTGui with a company license key, and the above folder can be written to, PTGui will ask whether the license should be activated for all users on the computer. Answer Yes to do so. If PTGui was already activated for a single user, first deactivate the software via Help - License Info - Deactivate. Then re-activate the software by entering the license key after ensuring all users have write permissions to the above folder.
Yes, PTGui and its documentation are available in English, Deutsch, Nederlands, Español, Français, Português, 日本語, 한국어 and 中文. The language can be selected in Options/Preferences. Yes, it is. You can use it to store your optimized lens data. Yes, PTGui performs all image processing in 16 bit if a 16 bit output format is selected on the Create Panorama tab. PTGui Pro even supports 32 bit floating point images. PTGui includes a viewer for publishing panoramas on a website. See Q for more information.

The web viewer included with PTGui is just a basic viewer for publishing individual panoramas. For a true virtual tour consisting of multiple panoramas linked by hotspots, clickable floor plans, etc, dedicated panorama publishing software exists. All panorama publishing software can load panoramas in x degree equirectangular projection, as created by PTGui. See Q for software recommendations. To determine the lens projection, PTGui needs to know the dimensions (in millimeters) of the camera's sensor. Some manufacturers state the sensor size in fractions of an inch (e.g. 1/"). The inch-designation dates back to TV camera tubes in the 50s and it does not appear to be mathematically related to the actual sensor size. See Table of sensor formats and sizes (Wikipedia) for a conversion table. This is normal; the optimizer adjusts your project in such a way that the lowest control point distance is obtained. By default this involves modifying the focal length of the lens. Apparently it is at this focal length that PTGui achieves the best alignment of the images. Yes, PTGui uses LibRaw which allows it to read RAW files produced by many cameras.

Note that RAW files are not regular image files. The RAW file records the data straight from the camera's sensor, which needs to be demosaiced and processed further before it can be used. Therefore RAW files should rather be seen as a digital 'negative' which first needs to be developed to get the actual image.

This development is done using standard settings, although PTGui Pro does allow you to adjust exposure and white balance in the HDR/Exposure tab.

If you need more control, use a dedicated RAW converter instead and save the converted RAW files as 16 bit TIFF images. The TIFF files can then be loaded into PTGui. This preserves the image quality and full dynamic range of the source images. Be sure to convert all source images in a panorama using the same settings, otherwise color or brightness differences may remain visible in the panorama.

Also, any adjustments made to the RAW file in Photoshop RAW (or other RAW converters) are ignored by PTGui. These programs do not actually change the RAW file; instead they write the modifications to a so-called sidecar (.xmp) file. The sidecar file contains closed proprietary data and cannot be read by other software. Therefore, if you need to make changes to RAW file or need finer control over the conversion, use a dedicated raw converter and save the images to 16 bit TIFF format.

Finally, since all RAW files are different it's possible that LibRaw does not (yet) support your camera. In that case it's also necessary to convert your images to TIFF before loading them into PTGui. PTGui uses the open source LibRaw library for decoding raw files. See Supported Cameras on the LibRaw website for a list of cameras supported by LibRaw. PTGui can only read raw files supported by LibRaw. If LibRaw does not support your camera, use a dedicated raw converter to convert the images to 16 bit TIFF.

See Q for more information. This copies the settings of another project to the current project, except for the images and the control points. This function is accessible both from the 'Apply Template' item in the File menu, and from the toolbar in PTGui. A template can be any PTGui project. In Tools/Options/Folders&Files, a folder can be configured where you store your templates (on Mac go to the PTGui menu, Preferences, Folders&Files). The template selection dialog will by default open in this folder. The 'Apply Template' button on the toolbar shows a drop down list of all templates in the configured template directory, for quick access.

Templates can be useful for a quick initialization of a project (lens settings, rough alignment of images), although this is usually not necessary since the Project Assistant can figure out the alignment of the panorama by itself.

Another use for templates is when you have an exact reproducable setup (high quality panoramic head with fixed angles). In this case you could copy all settings of a previous project and there would be no need for placing control points and optimizing.

By default, applying a template copies all settings from the template to the current project except for the source images and the control points. In PTGui Pro this behavior can be modified in the Project Settings tab, section 'template behavior'. By default applying a template copies all settings from the template except for the actual source images and the control points (see Q). Control points are never copied since they are specific to the source images. For example a control point could originally point to the corner of a building in the template project, but in another project the same coordinates may be in the middle of plain blue sky. In other words the control points are meaningless outside the context of the original images.

If you just need a project to be stitched exactly like the template project, control points are not needed at all. Control points are only used by the optimizer to determine the best image parameters. The stitcher only uses the optimized image parameters and ignores the control points. Therefore it's sufficient to apply the template (which copies the image parameters) and proceed straight to Create Panorama without running the optimizer. PTGui does not require any special hardware, even for stitching large panoramas. But if you're looking for high performance we recommend a PC with the following specifications:

• RAM: 16 GB or more. RAM is relatively cheap these days and data in RAM can be accessed at least x faster than data stored on disk.
• Disk: this should be an SSD, not a spinning hard drive. Especially when stitching large gigapixel panoramas, using an SSD for temporary storage will give a huge reduction in stitching time. If you must use external disks, connect them through USB 3 or thunderbolt; USB 2 is too slow. You can configure which drive PTGui uses for temporary storage in Options/Preferences (in the Folders & Files tab).
• GPU: PTGui features OpenCL hardware acceleration, reducing stitching time significantly. Basically any current AMD or NVIDIA graphics card of $ or more will be fine. See Q for more information.
• Processor: PTGui is multi threaded so it will run faster on processors having more cores. But with GPU acceleration enabled, disk speed usually becomes the bottleneck so money is better spent on SSD and RAM.
• OS: if running Windows, be sure to get the 64 bit version.

Currently, the following metadata is copied to the generated panorama:

• Original date and shooting date of the first image in the panorama
• Exposure data: exposure time, aperture and ISO sensitivity (only if identical for all source images)
• ICC Color Profile (only if identical for all images)
• GPS data: the GPS altitude, latitude and longitude of the source images are averaged and copied to the panorama

For rectilinear panos, PTGui also adds the FocalLength and FocalLengthIn35mm tag.

For spherical x degree panoramas, PTGui adds Photo Sphere XMP metadata so other applications will recognize the image as a spherical panorama.

For HDR panoramas in PTGui Pro, the 'blend planes' output contains the exposure/iso/aperture of that particular exposure, for merging in external software.

Other EXIF data is currently not copied to the output file. The above metadata is written to JPEG and TIFF images. Metadata support for Photoshop (.psb and .psd) files is limited, only the ICC profile and Photo Sphere XMP data are written. For .hdr and .exr files no metadata is currently written. First of all, you don't need a shift lens if you have PTGui! Shift lenses are often used for architectural photographs: photographing a building from ground level, while tilting the camera upwards, normally results in converging vertical lines. Shift lenses compensate for this effect by shifting the optical axis of the lens relative to the center of the image plane. The result is a photograph where parallel lines remain parallel.

The same effect can be achieved in PTGui: open the Panorama Editor window, press Ctrl-P to switch to 'Panorama Edit' mode. Now drag the panorama upwards or downwards until parallel lines in the scene are parallel in the panorama. You may need to increase the vertical field of view (using the slider to the right of the panorama).

If you do want to stitch images taken with a shift lens in PTGui, change the following parameters:

• Switch to Advanced mode by pressing the Advanced button in the side bar
• In the Lens Settings tab, select 'Individual Shift Parameters' for all images for which the lens was shifted
• Run the optimizer by pressing F5

Regardless whether a shift lens is used, or the panorama was shifted in the Panorama Editor, you will end up with some black space below or above the panorama. This can be removed by dragging yellow crop lines from the edges of the panorama in the panorama editor. The process is shown in detail in part two of our Video Tutorial. PTGui stores its configuration data in this folder:

Windows:
%APPDATA%\PTGui\
macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/PTGui/
To open this folder, do Tools - Open Folder - PTGui Configuration Folder in PTGui. Most configuration data is stored in manicapital.com in this folder. The default folders for Templates and Batch Lists also reside here. Stitching and blending requires a lot of disk and memory access. In particular for large panoramas, or on multi core computers, not the processor but the hard disk may be the speed limiting factor. Also, with a suitable graphics card much of the processing is offloaded to the GPU. If you are looking into increasing stitching speed, see Q The control point distance indicates how well a control point pair aligns in the panorama. When the distance is zero, the two points of a control point pair overlap exactly.

One should aim for the lowest control point distance possible, but the actual lowest distance that can be achieved depends on many factors. In general if your images were shot properly using a tripod with calibrated panorama head, a control point distance well below 5 should be achievable. Most remaining misalignments can usually be masked by the blender. An average distance higher than 5 usually indicates a problem, see Q for solutions.

It's particularly important to look at 'outliers': if a control point has a distance of 20 while the average is below 5, this control point might have been placed on a moving object, or on a similar feature close to the proper location. Use the 'Delete worst control points' function (in the Control Points menu) to remove such outlying control points. The Batch Stitcher of PTGui Pro can generate control points; it will do so if instructed by the 'Do Align Images and save the modified project' checkbox in the Project Settings. By default this is enabled if the control point generator has not yet been run for the project. This allows you to quickly generate a panorama in batch: start a new project, load your source images and press Save and Send to Batch Stitcher. The batch stitcher generates control points and stitches the panorama in one go.

After generating control points and aligning the images the batch stitcher overwrites the project file with the modified version. Since the Batch Stitcher will modify the project file, problems could occur if the project would remain opened at the same time in the main PTGui Pro window: both instances would be writing to the same project file, discarding each other's changes.

For this reason, PTGui Pro will close the project after sending it to the batch stitcher if the Batch Stitcher is configured to modify the project. This ensures that only one instance of the project is open. A warning message is shown before the project is closed but the warning is no longer shown if 'don't show this again' had been selected. To re-enable the warning message, go to Options/Preferences and click 'Reset all warning messages'.

In previous version of PTGui, a temporary copy of the project would be sent to the batch stitcher. This functionality is still available through 'Send Temporary Copy to Batch Stitcher'. This creates a copy of the current state of the project in a temporary file, which is sent to the batch stitcher for stitching. When stitching has finished the temporary project file is deleted by the batch stitcher. If PTGui fails to properly align your images, the following question may appear:

"The optimizer failed to achieve a good alignment of the images. Possibly the current misalignment of the images causes the optimizer to get stuck. Re-initialization of the project may help in such a case. Would you like to re-initialize the project and try to optimize again?"

If you click OK, PTGui will reset the yaw, roll and pitch of all images to zero and reinitialize the lens settings based on the EXIF data. Then it will attempt to figure out the image positions from scratch and subsequently reoptimize the project.

In particular in cases where the optimizer got stuck in a so-called local minimum such an initialization from scratch can be the solution.

This function can be triggered manually using the Initialize and Optimize (in the Project menu). These are commonly called 'Object Movies'; they cannot be created through stitching and therefore PTGui does not support this. A software package for creating object movies is Object2VR. The batch stitcher of PTGui Pro can not only stitch projects, but it can also set up a new panorama project by generating control points, aligning the images, etc. It will do so if instructed by the 'Do Align Images and save the modified project' checkbox in the Project Settings tab. If the project or template is already set up completely and the panorama should only be stitched, make sure that the above checkbox is unchecked. No, PTGui will load the raw files as they came straight from the camera, any modifications are ignored. In Photoshop RAW files can be edited, but the changes are written to a 'side car' file (with the .xmp extension) rather than to the original raw file. The settings in the side car file are specific to the algorithms used by Photoshop and cannot be used by other applications.

To use the modified RAW files in PTGui, export them to 16 bit TIFF files and load those in PTGui instead. Since RAW files typically only have 12 or 14 bits per channel, the full dynamic range will be preserved by the 16 bit TIFF file, so there is no loss of quality. The time required to stitch a panorama is influenced by many factors, such as the dimensions of the panorama, the computer hardware and by other applications running at the same time. Some general hints to improve the stitching performance:

• First of all, stitching time depends mostly on the output size of the panorama. The size of the source images also has a slight influence. Render the panorama at a smaller size to reduce stitching time.
• PTGui is slow in loading RAW and DNG images. For best performance convert your raw images to 16 bit TIFF format.
• Stitching to 16 bit output will generate twice as much data as when stitching to 8 bit output, and thus take longer.
• External blending plugins such as Smartblend may get slow for larger panoramas. Try the built in blender of PTGui instead.
• Memory usage of PTGui can be configured with the following setting in Tools-Options-Advanced (Windows) or PTGui-Preferences-Advanced (Mac):
  Use at most MB of RAM memory: PTGui will attempt to stitch the panorama in RAM as much as possible, but once the panorama is too large to fit entirely in RAM, temporary data will get written to disk. This setting determines the maximum amount of RAM that will be used. There is an optimum value: if PTGui has access to little RAM it will start to use the hard disk for temporary storage earlier, which is much slower. But if PTGui attempts to use too much RAM it will attempt to 'steal' RAM from other applications. The operating system will start swapping applications to and from disk if the total needed amount of RAM exceeds the amount available. This can bring the entire computer to a crawl. Therefore this setting should be chosen as high as possible, but such that no swapping occurs. Other memory intensive applications should be closed while PTGui is stitching.
  Finding the optimum values for these settings is a matter of trial and error.
• Adding more RAM memory, a fast hard disk or an OpenCL capable graphics card can improve stitching speed. See Q for hardware recommendations.

Don't attempt to align images manually: it's impossible to get the required precision for a seamless stitch. Even if you would manage to accurately align an image to one neighbouring image, this would throw it out of alignment with its other neighbour images.

Instead, let the PTGui optimizer do all the hard work through control points. Control points tell PTGui which points of two images should overlap. By providing 3 or 4 control point for a pair of overlapping images, PTGui will know how they overlap and the optimizer will align the images with pixel accuracy.

For more information watch our our Video Tutorial. PTGui was designed to efficiently stitch RGB color images (with or without transparency). It can read single channel greyscale TIFF files but the output will always be in RGB format. If you require single channel greyscale TIFF files as output, use third party software such as Photoshop to convert the output to the desired format. By default (the Create Panorama tab will show 'fix at % of optimum size'), PTGui will output your panorama at the so called Optimum Size. The optimum size is the output size at which the resolution of the panorama equals the resolution of the source images. For more information see Q

Because the optimum size depends on several parameters, including the focal length of the lens which is usually fine tuned by the optimizer, the optimum size may vary slightly after each optimization. This depends also on control point placement. If this fluctuation is unwanted, in the Create Panorama tab pick a desired size and select 'Fix at megapixels'. From now on PTGui will keep the number of pixels in the panorama constant. The optimum size is the output size at which the resolution of the panorama equals the resolution of the source images. In other words, no detail from the source images is lost.

Because image warping is not uniform across the panorama, there is no true optimum size: some parts of the source images may get enlarged while other parts may be reduced in size. Therefore, somewhat arbitrarily, PTGui considers the optimum size to be the size where the angular resolution of the center of the source images equals the angular resolution of the center of the panorama. If images from multiple lenses are used, this calculation will be based on the source image having the highest resolution.

Because the optimum size depends on several parameters which are adjusted by the optimizer, the optimum size may vary slightly for different projects using the same lens. See Q In PTGui 11 a new lens parameter, the 'fisheye factor' was introduced (see Q). This allows it to perfectly model all practical fisheye projections. PTGui 10 didn't include this parameter and used equidistant projection for all fisheye images. The difference between the actual projection and equidistant projection was modeled using the lens distortion (a/b/c) coefficients. When calculating the optimum size, the lens distortion coefficients are not taken into account, resulting in an error in the calculated optimum size. PTGui 11 does take the fisheye factor into account when calculating the optimum size.

In other words, the optimum size is calculated more accurately in PTGui 11 than in PTGui Regardless, it's still a somewhat arbitrary measure (see Q) and it's possible to output at any desired size. There is no single fisheye projection, different fisheye lenses exhibit different optical projections. For example, equidistant, equisolid or orthographic fisheye lenses exist. For more information see Fisheye Projection (PanoTools wiki). Visually, these projections differ by the amount of compression or stretching of the image near the edge of the fisheye circle. PTGui up to version 10 simply modeled every fisheye lens using the equidistant projection. The deviation of the actual projection from equidistant projection was compensated for by using the a/b/c lens distortion correction polynomial. This worked, but with caveats: because the relation between focal length and field of view differs for each kind of projection, PTGui could misestimate the size of the cropping circle for circular fisheye lenses. And secondly, the control point generator would have more difficulty finding control points (especially near the edges of the image) if the wrong fisheye projection was used.

In PTGui 11 this was solved by introducing the Fisheye Factor parameter. Fisheye lenses are now modeled using the following formula:



Here, k is the fisheye factor, f is the focal length, θ is the angle of the light ray entering the lens and R is the radial distance from the image center of the projected light ray.

By varying the fisheye factor k the equation morphs into the different fisheye projections. Values of the fisheye factor for the common projections are:

Equidistant: k = 0
Stereographic: k =
Orthographic: k =
Equisolid: k =
Rectilinear (non-fisheye): k =

In normal use of PTGui the fisheye factor is initialized to the known value of the lens before running Align Images. PTGui knows the fisheye factor for many common models of fisheye lenses. If EXIF data is available PTGui can often recognize the brand and model of the fisheye lens automatically, and set the fisheye factor accordingly. If no EXIF data is available, the brand and model of the fisheye lens can be selected from a list. In practise no lens follows the above projection model exactly, therefore a/b/c lens distortion correction is used to compensate for any remaining small differences between the ideal and actual projection.

The fisheye factor of a lens can be determined by the PTGui optimizer. When optimizing the fisheye factor, care must be taken to avoid interference by the a/b/c lens distortion correction parameters: in the Lens Settings tab, press the Reset button to reset a/b/c to zero. Then in the Optimizer tab, enable optization of the fisheye factor and disable optimization of a/b/c. As always, for accurate optimization of the lens parameters, images without parallax should be used. Yes, this is possible. Any version (trial, Pro, beta) can be installed in parallel to your current version of PTGui. In Windows, the installer will ask you for an installation folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\PTGui) and a Start Menu folder. If you enter different folder names, your current version will not be overwritten. On Mac, PTGui is distributed in a disk image (.dmg file). Double click the .dmg file to mount it. Inside there's the PTGui application. Drag the application to the desktop, then rename the application. Finally move the application from the Desktop into the Applications folder.

PTGui project files will by default be opened in the last installed version. To change this under Windows: right click on a PTGui project file, at 'Opens With' click on Change, click 'More Apps', click 'Look for another app on this PC', then browse (under Program Files) to the particular version of PTGui to use.

On macOS: ctrl+click on a PTGui project file, select 'Open With', 'Other', select the PTGui application to use, enable 'Always Open With' and click Open.

Keep in mind that the settings and license information are shared by all PTGui applications for the current user.

If you accidentally overwrote your licensed version of PTGui with a trial version, you can re-download your licensed version even if it was an older version; see Q
This is by design. The idea is to use the blended panorama as the basis for retouching, selectively revealing parts of the source images for retouching by making the masks opaque. TIFF is a container format which can contain many different types of image data; almost no application supports all possible TIFF formats. PTGui can create 16 or 32 bit TIFF files and TIFF files with an alpha channel but these features are not supported by many applications. If you need create a compatible TIFF file, press the 'Settings' button in the Create Panorama tab, and choose: 8 bits, no alpha channel and no compression. The resulting file can be opened in nearly every application that supports TIFF files. Also keep in mind that not all TIFF capable applications can read BigTIFF images, so they will fail to open TIFF files larger than 4GB. A normal application like PTGui (i.e. not a driver or a kernel process) is unable to crash an entire computer; the worst that could normally happen is the application itself crashing but not the entire computer.

If the computer crashes, shows a 'blue screen' error or spontaneously reboots this is usually indicating a problem with the hardware or a driver. It's possible that you observe the problem only when running PTGui: stitching large panoramas places a heavy load on the processor, hard disk and memory. This could trigger any existing hardware problems for example due to the increased temperature of the processor, due to increased load on the power supply, or simply because any existing problem is more likely to be seen when the system is used intensively.

If you however observe crashes in PTGui but the operating system continues to run properly then this could be a bug in PTGui. The Windows version of PTGui includes a crash reporter; we encourage you to submit the crash data to us for analysis. Mac users please send the crash report to us at support at ptgui dotcom; crash reports on the Mac can be found in <User>/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/. PTGui is currently not a color managed application, so it ignores any color profile embedded in the images. This means that images are always displayed in the working color profile (usually sRGB). If the images were taken in a different color profile they will be shown with incorrect brightness or color.

However the operations performed by PTGui (stitching and blending) are color neutral; therefore the output panorama will be in the same color space and the final result is not affected.

For regular (non HDR) panoramas the output file is tagged with the source ICC profile, provided that all source images have the same color space. The output from tone mapping and exposure fusion (for HDR panoramas) is currently not tagged with an ICC profile; such files need to be tagged manually with the ICC profile of the source images. To do so, open the tone mapped or exposure fused panorama in Photoshop, choose Edit-Assign Profile and pick the profile of the source images from the list.

The same applies to panoramas converted by the Publish to Website tool. When publishing panoramas to the web it is recommended to convert the images to sRGB profile. This ensures that the panoramas are shown correctly in all browsers and plugins, whether color managed or not.

Improved color management is one of the planned features for a future version of PTGui. When you press Align Images, PTGui analyzes your source images and looks for details which can be seen in multiple images. For example, the corner of a building might be visible in the right hand side of one image and in the left hand side of another image. On these matching details PTGui places so called Control Points. To see what control points look like, go to the Control Points tab in PTGui after you have run Align Images. In the Control Poins tab select two overlapping images by clicking the thumbnails above the images and you will see numbered markers indicating the matching features. Ultimately the control points are used by PTGui to set up the panorama: it warps and moves the images in such a way that the control points match as closely as possible.

If you see the above message, this means that PTGui was not able to find control points for all images. The human eye is still better in recognizing patterns than a computer and in this case you will need to help PTGui a bit. To do so, first open the Control Point Assistant (in the Tools menu). The Control Point Assistant will tell you what the problem is, for example 'Image 4 does not have any control points'.

Besides single images lacking control points it's also possible that there are clusters of images linked by control points: for example image 1,2 and 3 are linked by control points and image 4,5 and 6 are linked by control points, but there are no control points between images in either cluster. To create a panorama all images should directly or indirectly be linked by control points, so in this example adding control points between image 3 and 4 would solve the problem.

Suppose the Control Point assistant tells you that image 4 does not have control points: go to the Control Points tab in the main window, and choose image 4 in the left pane. In the right pane find an image which partially overlaps image 4 (most likely image 3 or image 5). Find an object which is visible in both images, click on that object in the left image and click on the same object in the right hand image. As you see a colored marker has been added. Repeat this until you have added at least 3 control points. Then go back to the Control Point Assistant and see if there are any other images that need control points.

When done, go back to the Project Assistant tab in the main window: the above error message is now gone. As the last step the project needs to be optimized: click on the blue underlined link to do this. The optimizer will re-align the images such that the control points match as closely as possible. Verify the result in the Panorama Editor window: the panorama should now be set up properly.

The above workflow is shown in detail in our Video Tutorial.

Sometimes an image contains no recognizable details at all (for example if the images contains pure blue sky only). In that case see Q

For more information use the on line help available for the Control Points tab and the Control Point Assistant window: in most screens you can get context help by pressing F1 (Windows) or Fn+F1 (Mac). The orientation of the images the main window is synchronized with the orientation of the images in the stitched panorama. For example, if you rotate an image in the Panorama Editor 90 degrees clockwise, the image thumbnail in the Project Assistant will be rotated clockwise as well. And if you rotate the entire panorama 90 degrees, all images in the Project Assistant will be rotated too.

If PTGui seems to randomly rotate your images after running Align Images, most likely it was unable to properly align the panorama, resulting in misaligned and randomly rotated images in the Panorama Editor. It may seem that the misalignments are caused by the random rotation but it is in fact the other way round: due to the misalignments the images get randomly rotated in the panorama, and the orientation of the images in the Project Assistant simply reflect the orientation of the images in the panorama.

Also see Q First of all, if you are new to PTGui check out our Video Tutorial. It may help you understand what the problem might be. In particular make sure that all images are taken from exactly the same viewpoint and that the camera is rotated around the entrance pupil of the lens (which is usually close to the front of the lens). In general a regular tripod is not suitable for taking panoramas; you need a dedicated panoramic head to ensure that the camera is rotated around the front of the lens and not around the tripod screw.

If this does not solve the issue please post your panorama to the PTGui support forum and we'll be happy to take a look. Large files cannot be uploaded to the forum directly; instead create a zip file with your panorama and upload it to a file publishing site such as sendspace or Dropbox. Then include the URL of the uploaded file in your forum post. To allow us to help you quickly, upload at least the PTGui project file (.pts). Depending on the problem we may need the image files as well. Regularly when we release a new version, the installer is diagnosed with the manicapital.comtion.1 threat and blocked by Norton Antivirus.

According to Symantec manicapital.comtion.1 means that the file has a low reputation score: 'The reputation-based system uses "the wisdom of crowds" (Symantec’s tens of millions of end users) connected to cloud-based intelligence to compute a reputation score for an application, and in the process identify malicious software in an entirely new way beyond traditional signatures and behavior-based detection techniques'.

In other words: PTGui was blocked just because it has had relatively few downloads among Norton Antivirus users. Which makes sense because it is a new version

Now Symantec does offer software vendors the option to submit their software to have it whitelisted. When we do so we get a friendly reply: 'Thank you for your request [] For a Software White-list request, Symantec will target a response of advising you of our final determination within 3 weeks.'.

To install PTGui you may therefore need to temporarily disable Norton Antivirus while downloading and installing. For more information see How to bypass Symantec’s manicapital.comtion.1 System. But we recommend to switch to a different virus scanner altogether. The next time Norton nags about your expired subscription, consider switching for example to Microsoft's own free virus scanner: Microsoft Security Essentials.

If you are still unsure whether it's safe to install PTGui, upload the installer to manicapital.com and have it scanned by over 40 different virus scanners. This is caused by the fact that Photoshop isn't aware that the left and right edge of the image wrap around. When doing local adjustments (in particular contrast enhancement) near one of the edges, pixels at the other edge should also be taken into account, otherwise a hard edge will be visible when the panorama is later wrapped around in a panorama viewer.

You can work around this limitation in Photoshop by extending the panorama: a section from the right hand side of the panorama is pasted next to the left hand side, and vice versa. Subsequent adjustments will then take properly into account the pixels 'over the edge'. When done editing, reduce the panorama to the original size.

We've created a set of Photoshop scripts to accomplish this with a single mouse click: download manicapital.com Please see manicapital.com inside the zip file for installation instructions. This may happen while aligning or stitching large panoramas in the 32 bit version of PTGui, due to the fact that 32 bit applications can only access a limited amount of memory.

To check if you are running the 32 bit or 64 bit version, go to Help - System Information and scroll down to the line 'Platform'. This will show 'mac64/mac' or 'win64/win64' for the 64 bit version, or 'mac32/mac' or 'win32/win32' for the 32 bit version. Every Mac produced since is 64 bit capable, and PTGui will run in 64 bit mode on those machines. On Windows the situation is different: your computer can only run 64 bit applications if it was shipped with the 64 bit version of Windows. The 32 bit version of Windows is still in common use; running the 64 bit version of PTGui would require installing a new operating system.

In 32 bit Windows by default each application has access to a 2 GB memory space. When an application attempts to access more than 2 GB of memory, it will abort with an Out of Memory error. In practise the situation is worse: while the application is running the memory space becomes fragmented due to repeated memory allocations and de-allocations: even if there are 5 separate blocks of 50 MB available, requesting a single 60 MB block will fail. The memory limit does not depend on the actual amount of RAM installed: even on a computer with 8 GB of RAM each application can only use 2 GB.

Stitching large panoramas often requires several gigabytes of memory to store the pixel data. PTGui will attempt to stay within the memory limit by using no more than a certain amount of RAM. If more memory is needed some of the data will be written to temporary files, to be loaded back into memory later when needed. But because not every byte of memory is accounted for, and because the actual memory limit is unknown due to fragmentation, out of memory conditions may still occur.

If you run into out of memory errors, go to Options / Advanced and reduce the 'use at most MB of RAM memory' setting until the problem goes away.

There is a '3GB' switch in the 32 bit versions of Windows: this increases the memory limit from 2 GB to 3 GB. Enabling this switch may help to get rid of out of memory errors and increase the performance of PTGui. To enable the 3 GB switch in the 32 bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8:

• Run a command prompt window as Administrator. In Windows 8 and later you can right-click on the start menu and choose Command Prompt (Admin). In earlier Windows versions go to the Accessories program group of the Start menu, right click on Command Prompt and choose 'Run as Administrator'.
• At the command prompt, enter: bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVa (followed by the Enter key).
• The command window should show 'The operation completed successfully'.
• Restart the computer.

Please note that there may be side effects of enabling the 3GB switch. If you run into any problems the 3GB switch can be disabled again by following the same steps but replacing the command above by bcdedit /deletevalue IncreaseUserVa
For some technical background information see Demystifying /3GB

To check if the 3GB switch is enabled, do Help - System Information in PTGui and scroll down to Virtual Memory. If this is , the 3 GB switch is enabled. If it says , the 3 GB switch is not enabled. This may happen when installing older versions of PTGui on newer versions of macOS. Apple has locked down macOS to only allow running signed applications. Over the years Apple has changed the requirements for signing multiple times. The current PTGui version has the proper signatures but older PTGui versions will be rejected by macOS.

The signature verification can be bypassed as follows: Ctrl+click on the PTGui application, select 'Open'. In the subsequent warning window, click 'Open'. QuickTime VR (or QTVR) was a special dialect in the QuickTime .mov video format supporting interactive playback of spherical panoramas. For many years this has been the format of choice for embedding panoramas in web pages: the QuickTime plugin was installed on every Mac and on many Windows computers (it was included with iTunes for Windows). With the introduction of QuickTime X in , Apple has dropped support for QTVR panoramas. These days HTML5 is the format of choice for displaying panoramas on web pages (see Q).

QTVR panoramas can still be viewed by installing QuickTime 7, but be aware that this creates a security risk: exploits for QuickTime 7 exist and Apple is no longer updating the software. That said:
Installing QuickTime Player 7 on your Mac
Download QuickTime 7 for Windows.
Windows users can alternatively use the DevalVR player (Unicode) which can also play back QTVR panoramas.

Pano2VR can be used to convert an existing QTVR .mov file to another format. Seamless panoramic stitching requires that all images are taken from exactly the same viewpoint. Moving the viewpoint causes parallax which makes it impossible to stitch images perfectly. For more information about parallax see Q and watch the Video Tutorial.

This requirement is very critical: even photos taken from viewpoints spaced only a few centimeters can have significant parallax, causing clearly visible stitching errors on nearby objects. When taking panoramas with a single camera parallax should be avoided by using a panoramic tripod head: this ensures that the camera is rotated around the 'no parallax point' which is usually located near the front of the lens.

When using multiple cameras, parallax is unavoidable which means that it is simply impossible to stitch the images perfectly. This problem is particularly apparent in panoramic video because this can only be created from multiple cameras. The only real 'solution' is to lower your expectations and accept that stitching errors will be visible. That said, for the best results consider the following:

• Try to mount the cameras as closely as possible to reduce the parallax
• The effect of parallax diminishes as objects get further away from the camera. If there's an object close to the camera try to make sure it is captured entirely in one of the images, instead of having a seam run through it.
• Making a stitching template for panoramic video is generally best done using images taken in a wide open space, placing control points only on distant objects (which don't have much parallax due to the distance). This ensures that PTGui is able to correctly estimate the lens parameters. While you may be able to somewhat improve the stitching of a particular scene by adding extra control points on a nearby object, this will in fact degrade the stitching of other frames where the object or the camera has moved, so don't do this when creating a stitching template.

Essentally there are two different use cases for the batch builder:

1. To stitch many panoramas using the exact same settings, without generating control points. This can be used for example with multi camera rigs, where all panoramas are guaranteed to have the same image orientations.
2. or to automatically stitch a number of panoramas by just pointing PTGui to a folder with images. The images are taken for example by rotating the camera on a panoramic tripod head.

In the latter case the image positions in each panoramas will usually be slightly different. Even if the panoramic head has click stops, mechanical tolerances will cause small variations in the image orientations in each panorama. To compensate for this PTGui should analyze the images for each panorama and generate control points.

Whether the batch stitcher will generate control points is controlled by this setting in the project:
Project Settings -> Batch Stitcher actions -> Do 'Align Images' and save the modified project
This option should be checked in the template used in the Batch Builder, unless the image positions in each panorama will be absolutely identical. If you are using a multi camera rig and need all panoramas to be stitched absolutely identically, uncheck this setting in your template:
Project Settings -> Batch Stitcher actions -> Do 'Align Images' and save the modified project
Also see Q

If you do require PTGui to generate control points but would like to keep the panorama size and projection as set in the template, see: Q This is a known issue caused by a bug in Intel's graphics driver. It's affecting the PTGui Viewer only, the stitched panorama from PTGui should be fine. The problem seems to be limited to Windows computers with dual graphics processors (both a low power Intel integrated GPU and a more powerful AMD or NVIDIA discrete GPU). The problem can be solved by updating the Intel graphics driver. For laptops a driver package is usually made available on the laptop manufacturer's website. Look for the driver package including the Intel graphics driver.

If a driver update is not possible, the problem can be solved by telling Windows 10 to always use the AMD or NVIDIA graphics (and not Intel's integrated graphics) for the PTGui Viewer:

• Open the Windows 10 Settings app by pressing the Windows key + i
• Click on System
• Click on Display
• Scroll to the bottom and select 'Graphics settings'
• Under 'Graphics performance preference' select 'Classic app'
• Click Browse and browse to the PTGui Viewer application: C:\Program Files\PTGui\manicapital.com
• The PTGui Viewer is now listed in the Graphics Settings window. Click its Options button, select 'High performance' and click Save

Another alternative is to use FSPViewer (which doesn't use OpenGL) instead of the PTGui Viewer. See Q This may happen on Windows machines with NVIDIA graphics hardware. Recently NVIDIA have released a driver update for Windows which appears to break GPU acceleration in PTGui The problem does not seem to affect PTGui 11 and later.

If you don't wish to upgrade to PTGui 11, you may do one of the following:

• Disable GPU acceleration in PTGui (see Options - Advanced)
• Or downgrade the GPU driver to an earlier version. NVidia's driver version is known to work. To download older nvidia drivers see: NVIDIA advanced driver search. But please understand that security problems may have been fixed in later drivers. Running older driver versions may be a security risk.

This problem occurs with older versions of the PTGui web viewer on recent versions of Firefox. It is fixed in the current version of the PTGui Viewer. Web pages created with Publish to Website in PTGui should not exhibit the problem.

For panoramas created with earlier versions the problem can be fixed by updating manicapital.com on your web server. Download the latest PTGui Viewer here and replace manicapital.com on the web server with the latest version. Right-clicking in the panorama on the website should show 'PTGui Viewer version ' (or newer). If you still see the old version, clear the browser cache or append a random query string to the url in the html page like this: <script src="manicapital.com?random=">This will force the web browser to use the new version. This is a known limitation of the Detail Viewer when using Tone Mapping or Exposure Fusion. Tone Mapping and Exposure Fusion make local contrast adjustments to the image. Adjustments in a particular area are influenced by the image contents surrounding that area. For example, if the sun is visible in the panorama, Tone Mapping and Exposure Fusion will darken the areas in the sun's neighborhood.

This means that to properly apply Tone Mapping or Exposure Fusion, the panorama must be processed as a whole. But the the Detail Viewer only sees a part of the panorama. Suppose the sun is just outside the visible area of the detail viewer, and then the Detail Viewer's orientation is moved until the sun becomes visible. This will completely change the tone mapped image.

In other words, Tone Mapping and Exposure Fusion in the Detail Viewer offer just an approximation. The actual result can be seen in the Panorama Editor. A quick preview can be generated by pressing the 'eye' toolbar button in the Panorama Editor, or through the Preview Tab in the main window.