Photo merging software?

[Merlin66]

I’m trying unsuccessfully to merge two solar images.....
I’ve tried MS ICE with no success.
What can you recommend??

[Atmos]

I personally use AutoPano Giga. If you Dropbox them I can give it a go when I get home.

[Merlin66]

Colin,
Thanks for the kind offer...
If I can't resolve the problem I'll definitely let you know.
So far MS ICE and Hugin haven't worked for me.
(It's only a two image mosaic of the solar surface in CaK)

[Merlin66]

Colin, et al,
The price of AutoPano Giga puts me off....
I downloaded iMerge (only works with .bmp and .fits files), Autostitch which wouldn't work with my files (tiff?) so back to MS Ice...
Finally managed to get the images to merge!!
Need to be more rigorous in my processing (and documenting what I do to each image.)
One was from FireCap the other with SharpCap, stacked with AS3! and "sharpened" wavelets in Registax6.....
I'll go back to the initial data and see if I can get both images "looking the same" before merging.

[gregbradley]

I use PTGui Pro and it works most of the time. I do though often have to manually add some stitching points in nightscapes. It particularly does not like starry night shots with no landscape component to match it all up with.

Photoshop and Lightroom now have a panorama merge feature. It works well sometimes and not that great in other times but the result is presented as layers so you can adjust the masks to get a better fit sometimes.

Greg.

[Atmos]

I agree with this, I did try an older copy of PTGui and found that it did really struggle with registering stars but what AutoPano does is amazing. It doesn’t work with linear data though.

[sil]

You should have been able to use TIFF from memory, you usually have options when saving tiff (uncompressed, zip compression, lzw compression) that not all software supports , surprised Hugin failed, I assume you meant auto point placement? I have done stitches with Hugin that people told me were impossible but it took me months of manual point control to do it.

I'd like something like PIPPs "center object" feature that can identify a circle or partial circle object (like half the sun) and center its circumcenter in a larger square image so you can just stack and blend manually at least.

ICE and Autopano Giga I still think are the easiest good stitchers around, Hugin can blow them away under full manual control but its rare I can be bothered, ICE rarely fails me. Glad you got it sorted though!