DoubleTake: best panorama stitch tool for Mac OS X

November 14, 2005 - 11:34pm by bmann Tags:

Last night I was up too late for my own good, drawn into some strange corners of the Internet over on the Mac section of Danny Choo's site, and found a link to DoubleTake, a Mac OS X application for stiching together panoramas. I decided not to try it out, but did add it to my del.icio.us links for later. My description was a bit strange ("$12; there are no free stitch apps that I can find; I'm having a hard time finding *good* ones, never mind free ones"), and hinted at my frustration with other tools like the open source, highly complex/somewhat slow Hugin and Canon's crappy still-looks-like-OS-9 Photostich.

I was very surprised to get up this morning and get an email from Henrik Dalgaard, creator of DoubleTake and other apps at Echo One. He is obviously tracking del.icio.us linkage, and wanted to know more:

Thank you for the delicious comment. It is ambigous though. Do you
have any feedback I could use to make DoubleTake better?
I am aiming to make it simple to get quality results with DoubleTake,
and let Stitcher and Hugin take care of the more professional needs.

I felt a bit silly, since I hadn't even tried the software yet, and also amazed at how well Henrik is tracking feedback. Well, I got home today, tried it out, and here's my review (in fancy dancy hReview format, thanks to hReview creator, inspired by D'Arcy Norman).

0.2

Best panorama stitch tool for Mac OS X

Nov 14, 2005 by Boris Mann product DoubleTake

★★★★★

The joy of DoubleTake begins with the download and unpacking of the disk image for the beta release of version 2 (available at the bottom of this page at Echo One). The original 1.6 version as well as the beta version are bundled together, along with sample images and a link to the online one page manual. Surprisingly, the one page manual is not only good, but pretty much unnecessary -- I used DoubleTake just fine without it, although I did learn that you can rotate and/or otherwise adjust the original photos in iPhoto, and DoubleTake will notice and update them.

Once you've installed and launched DoubleTake, you'll notice immediately that the UI is very Mac-like -- it looks like a native application, right down to the transparent grey floating windows: one for Geometry (rotating, etc.) and one for Adjustments (basic brightness, etc.). Operation is drag-and-drop -- take one or multiple images from anywhere, including directly from iPhoto, and drop them in the new window. DoubleTake will roughly arrange them, and leave the fine tuning up to you.

And the fine-tuning is darn easy: you can pretty much eyeball the alignment of features and it sort of snaps into place, immediately showing you what the finished picture is going to look like. While dragging, the dragged image goes translucent, making it easy to overlay on top of the next one. As you can see in the second screenshot, DoubleTake overlays a watermark when not registered. I don't remember what application I was testing, but it did grayscale or sepia output when not registered. Since colour blends/seams are an important part of panoramas, I much prefer the watermark method.

Once you're happy with what you see, all you have to do is save. The preview onscreen nicely matches the final product, with minimal delay in stitching. You can save in DoubleTake format to keep your arrangement for later tweaking, or output to JPEG, PDF, or PNG. On save there is a short "rendering" phase, which takes a few seconds on my Powermac G5 to output a 5000x1400 pixel panorama. Here's a sample panorama of Nymph Falls, or check the DoubleTake tag in my Flickr account for all images:

All in all, a well deserved 5 out of 5. And of course, I liked it so much I bought it -- $12US for easy panorama stitching is definitely worth the money, and hints of Automator support and other tidbits show a real awareness of native Mac goodies that should definitely be supported.

Note: a lot of people still seem to be on the lookout for other tools. Leave a comment if you have recommendations to favourite apps. In particular, I have heard good things about AutoPano as a professional tool, which is based on the AutoStitch codebase / algorithms. It is cross platform and runs on Windows / Linux / Mac.

Comments

Submitted by Cleanhead (not verified) on March 15, 2010 - 8:21pm.

I like DoubleTake a lot

As a film Location Manager I take panoramic photos when scouting for locations. Day in, day out: quick and dirty handheld pans from small unlit crawlspaces to the wide open prairie. When my old stitching program surprisingly broke when I upgraded to a new MacBook Pro with OSX 10.6 (snow leopard) I had to find stitching program fast. I found and grabbed DoubleTake and used it with the watermark for a couple of days to continue to crank out the work, but then decided it had already saved me more money and especially time than the small fee would cost, even if it wasn't going to use it as my main stitching app in the future.

Well I haven't had to find another app.

(Currently I download with Canon's ImageBrowser, because I use their cameras and it puts each pan shot with stitch-assist into individual folders, then hand each pan's photos over to DoubleStitch using the "Edit with Registered Application" menu. Once they are all stitched as tiffs I batch process the large pans to jpgs in Photoshop Elements, putting a watermark on them while sizing them and doing small automated exposure adjustments.)

I would love to investigate a more automated stitching workflow, where I throw the day's photos in a folder and it picks out, sorts and stitches the pans, but I'm too busy working long days and raising a family to learn Applescript. If anyone is having stitching workflow conversations and efficiency comparisons, I'd like appreciate a link.

Cheers to DoubleTake from Toronto.

Submitted by Jez (not verified) on March 9, 2010 - 8:42am.

Refining & updating the post

Let's keep this dialogue going!
I'm a great fan of the Panorama process, from my initial (real) cut & pasting 15 years ago, to the simple & lovely functionality of the camera on the Sony Ericson mobile.

As a Mac user (recent convert) I've been using the HP Photosmart Studio Stitcher, but recently been having problems getting the quality to be consistantly high (it used to produce up to 15MB shots which you could then size down) but now dissappointingly drops out to 400kb shots.

I have Hugin downloaded here (and a 10 hour train journey ahead) so it's refreshing to hear your post.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Cheers

Jez

Submitted by bmann on March 9, 2010 - 4:21pm.

Thanks!

Great addition, Jez. Please come back and tell us about your Hugin experiences.

I recently looked for a "professional" panorama tool, and it looks like AutoPano by a German company is the main cross platform tool out there. Expensive, but it looks like it can compile truly gigantic panoramas.

Submitted by Bob (not verified) on August 11, 2009 - 4:38pm.

DoubleTake

Found your 2005 review of DoubleTake. My dad wanted a panoramic stitcher for his Mac, so we downloaded both DoubleTake and Hugin. Tried Hugin first and after making a lot of guesses about the technical terminology and multiple screens, we got mediocre results with stitching together a 6-photo pan.

Then, we tried DoubleTake, dropped the 6 photos on the window and almost immediately had a panoramic photo that was far superior to what we got with Hugin and took a mere fraction of the time and effort. I'd love to pay <$20 for this software but I think it's worth $25 -- my dad does, too, and he's already said he's buying.

Submitted by juli robarts on October 1, 2008 - 9:44pm.

$25 CAD for Mac panorama software DoubleTake

Some time between 2005 and now it looks like they increased the price to €16.95 which at this writing comes out to about $25 Canadian. $12 would have hit the sweet spot for a panorama-maker for the Mac. I'm all for paying money for software: a guiding principle is that the software should have 'enough' features, so I would never buy Photoshop, for example, but I'd be interested in buying multiple little software pieces that do everything I need and just that. Maybe DoubleTake has too many features and therefore doesn't hit the sweet spot? Or maybe it's still worth it. The point is I had to think about it.

How's the market for open source Mac panorama software looking these days?

Submitted by Jochen (not verified) on December 23, 2008 - 9:00am.

Try Hugin, it's free !

Just stumbled across this comment with a fairly recent date (October 1st, 2008), although the post is quite outdated. So I thought it makes sense to let you know about a tool that I use to create panoramas:

If you are looking for open source panorama stitchers, have a look at Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/). Not only is it free, but from the impression I got from looking at DoubleTake's manual, it also appears to be much better. (I mean, you have to drag images in DoubleTake to align them? Does it even remove the distortions created by the lens? How good can the alignment be this way? No wonder their samples consist of two images only.)

In Hugin you import your photos (drag them from iPhoto), let autopano create some control points by feature matching (you may also add some control points for horizontal or vertical lines to align the panorama properly), call the optimizer, if necessary call the photometric optimization (to compensate for vignetting), and stitch the panorama.

Sure, the software offers a lot of functionality, which may be overwhelming at first, but you can usually get somewhere by just using the default settings. And still the results will probably be much better than what a simple alignment by hand could give you. But you have the option to do much more (eg. create HDR images, ...) once you find your way around.

Hope it helps.

Submitted by bmann on December 23, 2008 - 10:30am.

Thanks

Thanks for your comments on Hugin. I'm a fan of open source, so good to hear that Hugin has evolved a bit. The last time I used it, it was a bit complex.

Just to correct your assumption from viewing the manual, DoubleTake is just drag and drop from iPhoto or wherever your source photos are -- everything auto aligns, there is no step 2.

Submitted by Jochen (not verified) on October 5, 2009 - 7:12am.

Actually that is not really

Actually that is not really true. I tried Double take out myself.

It is true, you drag photos in there and it somehow aligns them. You see a panorama right away. However, the alignment with my photos usually was so bad (I'm not talking about a few pixels, but way off) that then you have to open the tool to adjust the geometry by hand to improve on that and that is not only tedious trying to adjust rotation, tilt and the focal length to improve the alignment, it is also not very accurate. That is something the software should do. Hugins does it well, while DoubleTake seems to get it sometimes (with the demo photos) and at other times it only gives a starting point from where you have to do everything manually.

Well I guess it all boils down to what you expect from such a software. If you want to get a relatively small panorama (eg. to put it on a website, which probably is what most people want to do anyway) from a few pictures fast and and you don't mind some mistakes as long as they
are not too obvious at first sight, DoubleTake is for you.
But if you want the result to be as close to reality as possible (eg. houses should not show up twice in a panorama or straight lines should be straight across of image borders ...), or if you want to create a high resolution panorama with lots of details where even small alignment errors or lens distortion effects become obvious, hugin will, at least in my experience, provide better results, if not to say results that are not possible with DoubleTake, even with a lot of hand tweaking of divers parameters.

Submitted by bobo on November 18, 2005 - 1:50pm.

Thanks for the review

Thanks for the review Boris. Funny that I saw the finished product of your stitching before I found your review on DoubleTake. As you mentioned, Canon's PhotoStitch is not pretty so perhaps I'll download a copy of DoubleTake and try it out.

Submitted by D'Arcy Norman (not verified) on November 15, 2005 - 1:00pm.

stitchers

I'd _KILL_ for a MacOSX native version of Autostitch ( http://www.autostitch.net )

Best. Pano stitcher. EVER!

Submitted by Dave N (not verified) on April 24, 2010 - 8:28pm.

Calico from Kekus is another port of Autostitch

Calico is another Mac port of Autostitch that I've had a lot of fun and success with. It is priced between the pro end Autopano and DoubleTake. One nice feature it has, similar to Autopano, is automatic grouping of images into individual panoramas. I take a bunch of photos from a trip which are a mix of panoramas and individual shots, throw it into Calico and it finds the panoramas for processing and discards the individual snap shots.

Submitted by JJ (not verified) on January 26, 2009 - 6:20am.

Autostitch

Another old-post-dragger-upper here.

I was an Autostitch user on Windows too. I couldn't agree more, it is a fantastic product - almost a secret weapon compared to the more "commercial" products that can never seem to match the simplicity, or results, of Autostitch. I suspect people overlook it because it's free and very basic in appearance.

Autopano Pro (http://www.autopano.net/) uses Autostitch code, and produces fantastic panos just as easily as Autostitch did - AND it is available on the Mac. The BIG downside? The cost. 99 Euros, or about USD$130. Ouch. I must say I'm very tempted though... It IS that good, and includes far more control and flexibility than Autostitch, without sacrificing the ease of use.

Double Take seemed okay, but didn't cope nearly as well with a bunch of random photos as Autopano Pro did for me. It seemed to need a lot of manual alignment effort to produce a similar result - where Autopano Pro needed none, zip, zero. I only tried them out on one pano of 26 shots though, so hardly an exhaustive comparison.

As for Hugin, I found that very messy to install and use - something as a Mac user I'm now far less tolerant of :D

I guess it depends what you're using the software for. If you're serious about Panos, I'd definitely recommend looking at Autopano Pro... if you have the spare cash.

Submitted by bmann on November 15, 2005 - 4:17pm.

Autostitch

Yes, I had come across Autostich in my travels -- Windows only although theoretically the FAQ says that Linux / Mac is in progress. And I think the link is actually this one: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

I think that DoubleTake will pretty much fulfill all casual needs. I've never done a panorama that does top/bottom stitching as well...will have to experiment one of these days.

Submitted by Lee LeFever (not verified) on November 15, 2005 - 10:43am.

Me too

Yeah, I've been playing with panorama's too and I'm using a non-free and Windows tool called "Panorama Factory" which works well for my purposes.

Something that I think is great is the panorama assist on my camera, the Pentax Option WP. I imagine other cameras have it too, but it makes the shots come out great. You tell the camera which direction you're panning and when you take a shot, it adds a 50% transparent (1/5th) slice of the previous picture on the side of the viewfinder for lining up the next shot. The assist and the tool make them come out pretty doggone good.

Submitted by bmann on November 15, 2005 - 4:18pm.