i2k Quickage™ was designed to be extremely easy to use with a user interface so simple that it does not really require any user guide. The software is so powerful that the default settings produce
stunning results. In fact you can even drag & drop images on top of the application icon and it will automatically generate a montage. For those who are interested in knowing more and looking a
bit under the hood, we have created this page with explanations about running the software, the Advanced Options, the Preferences, and an FAQ.
Getting Starting
Advanced Options
Preferences
FAQs and Suggestions on Taking Pictures
Getting Started with i2k Quickage™
Generating a Montage
Generating a montage in i2k Quickage™ is easy! Use the subwindow on
the left to navigate to the folder containing the photos. The photos
in the chosen folder will appear in the subwindow on the right. Click
each individual photo you want to include in the montage. The chosen
images (five in the example above) will be highlighted. Then click
Generate Montage, and wait for the result. It is that easy. A
preview of the resulting montage, along with a summary of what i2k
Quickage™ did will be shown at the end. The full-sized montage will be
saved to an image file in a
location of your choice.
If you want to generate a second montage using different photos in the
same folder, be sure to click-off the photos you used for the first
montage. This step is unnecessary if the photos you want are in a
different folder.
Trial Mode
When you first run i2k Quickage™ you will be in trial mode, which
allows you to test i2k Quickage™ for 5 days or 25 montages, whichever
comes
first. During this trial period you can switch back and forth between
the Express and Pro versions of i2k Quickage™ either by restarting the
software and making your selection, or clicking on the Help ->
Activate menu. Montages generated during the trial period are
full-size, but have i2align™ watermarks on them.
Activating i2k Quickage™
You may activate i2k Quickage™ Express or i2k Quickage™ Pro by
typing in the 16-digit activation code you received (or will
receive, once you purchase it) via email. You can do this
when you start or restart the software, or by clicking Help
-> Activate.
Advanced Options
Advanced options for i2k Quickage™ are accessed by clicking on the > symbol on the main i2k Quickage™ page. Some of these options are only
available with the Pro version.
i2k Quickage™ Pro interface - Advanced Options
Layout Options
i2k Quickage™ offers four modes for "Layout", which essentially determines how the images are combined.
1)Auto
When Auto is selected, which is the default, i2k Quickage™ automatically
chooses between the three options, Cylindrical, Perspective and
Reposition. The automatic selection between these
is based on evaluating what each does to the photos in a particular
montage and choosing the one that appears to be the best. Instead of
letting i2k Quickage™ choose the layout automatically, you may choose
one of the three options yourself...
2) Cylindrical
This is most appropriate when the images are taken by sweeping the
camera left-to-right or right-to-left, perhaps using multiple levels of
sweeps. Cylindrical maps the photos onto a virtual cylinder and then unwraps
the cylinder to create the flat montage. In doing so, some curving can
be introduced near the top and bottom of the montage.
3) Perspective
This is most appropriate when taking pictures of a something flat, such
as the facade of a building or a painting. Perspective maps all
the photos onto a single flat surface. Photos well-away from the
center may become somewhat stretched during this process.
4)
Reposition
This is a simplified version of both cylindrical and reposition and
may be used when the main subject is far from the photographer and
there is little of specific interest near the top or bottom of the
photos (e.g. sky in the top third and water in the bottom third).
Reposition also places the photos on a flat surface, but only does so
by moving the individuals photos up, down, left and right. This does not allow enough flexibility to create seamless montages, especially on the top and the bottom, but sometimes the magic of seam selection can hide the visual differences, for example in the clouds of the sky and the ripples of the water. When it creates a seamless montage
Reposition is the best choice of all, but look at your results
carefully.
Differences between
layout modes
The differences between Cylindrical and Perspective, and sometimes
Reposition as well, are quite small when
- Taking only a few
photos
- The subject is far from the camera, or
- The lens is zoomed in.
This can be seen in the following example where differences between
perspective and cylindrical appear only in the size and orientation of
the
foregound objects.
Delhi, India 3 Shot Montage - Perspective
Delhi, India 3 Shot Montage - Cylindrical
The differences between the layout modes start to appear when the
field of view of the montage grows well-beyond the scope of a normal,
unzoomed photo. The effect is similar to, but much less dramatic, than
that of a wide-angle or fish-eye lens.
Note: This
is one reason why i2k Quickage™ montages are much more attractive than
single photos taken to capture wide fields of view.
In summary, the Auto Layout mode tries to balance the effects of the
curvature of Cylindrical, the stretching of Perspective, and the seams
of Reposition, picking the option that it estimates will give the best
overall final montage. In some cases, you will prefer a different
layout to the one chosen by the Auto mode. In this case, you can
experiment with the Advanced Options by choosing Cylindrical,
Perspective or Reposition yourself and seeing what happens.
Area
Percent for Auto-Crop
When
i2k Quickage™ aligns the photos to form the montage, the outlines of
the photos will usually form an irregular shape, especially when many
photos are being combined. i2k Quickage™ automatically crops this
montage,
finding the largest possible rectangle that fits inside the irregular
montage boundaries. In most cases, this produces a very nice result
indeed, despite the loss of pixels outside the cropping rectangle.
Sometimes, however, you may feel that too much montage area is lost to
cropping or important details are eliminated.
Fortunately, i2k Quickage™ gives you a way to control cropping by
setting
the Area Percent for Auto-Crop using a slider bar under Advanced
Options.
-
Slide to the Right: Sliding to the right, toward 100%, tells i2k
Quickage™
that a larger percentage of the montage area must be preserved in order
for auto-cropping to be applied. Sliding it all the way to the right
means i2k Quickage™ will never crop.
-
Slide to the Left: By sliding the bar to the left, you tell i2k
Quickage™ to
crop more and more irregularly shaped montages. Setting the bar all the
way to the left, to 0, means i2k Quickage™ will always crop.
The default setting is 70% and we at DualAlign have found that this
works quite well for a large majority of montages. The following
example illustrates an uncropped montage with the yellow rectangle
showing the auto-crop area. This cropping preserves 71% of the
(non-black) montage area and therefore is generated by i2k Quickage™
using the default setting.
JPEG
Quality Option
The JPEG image format compresses image files. In doing so, there is a
trade-off between the size of the file and the appearance quality of
the image when it is reloaded into a viewer. This trade-off may be
controlled using the JPEG Quality bar under the Advanced Options.
- Sliding
the bar to the left will result in smaller montage files, but the
montages will start to have a "blocky" appearance.
- Sliding
the bar to the right will result in much larger files, but higher
quality photos.
For most applications, the default setting is just fine, although if
you want to blow-up your resulting montage and you are not worried
about file size, then please go ahead and set the quality to 100%.
Radiance
Image (16 bit HDR) (Pro only)
During montage generation, i2k Quickage™ estimates properties of the
camera
and the lens as the basis for combining the photos. In doing so, it also
estimates the amount of light - the "radiance" that formed each pixel.
When generating the final montage, the radiance values are converted
back to colors. This conversion balances the twin goals of preserving
the original colors taken by the camera and combining the photos into a
pleasing, seamless whole.
In most cases, this works just fine. Advanced users wanting more
control over the final pixel colors and brightness values, may want
i2k Quickage™ to stop with the radiance values, saving them as a
"Radiance
Image". This option is most useful when scene has significant
brightness variation, with photos being taken in and out of shadows.
The Radiance Image is akin to a High-Dynamic Range image, although is
it acquired by moving the field of view of the camera rather than by
fixing the field of view and taking multiple exposures. The result is
stored in a 16-bit-per-color TIFF image (ordinary TIFF images have
8-bits per color). Users not familiar with the properties of image
radiance will notice that the resulting montage has a dark appearance,
almost like the shadows and darkening of the sky at dusk.
In short, i2k Quickage™ effectively offers two options in handling the
colors and brightness values. The default option generates as faithful
a combination of the original photo values as possible. The Radiance
Image option generates values roughly proportional to the original
radiance values, allowing the user to create the final colors from
these using a different tool.
Preferences
The Preferences are
provided for settings that you are likely to want
to repeat for many or all montages you generate.
Automatically Save Montages
i2k Quickage™ has three different preferences for saving its generated
montages. The first preference, which is the default, is to save each
montage to the same folder where the original photos reside. In this
case, the name of the montage is automatically generated. The second
preference is to pre-specify the output folder only, with the actual
name of the montage generated automatically, just like the first
preference. This preference is useful when you would like to collect
all of your montages in one place. The final preference is for
manually specifying the folder and name of each montage. For each
montage you want to create, you will be asked to specify these after
you click the Generate Montage button.
Output Image Format (Pro only)
Even if you set the JPEG Quality to 100% under the Advance Options,
the output montage will still be somewhat compressed and some quality
will be lost. This is the nature of the JPEG format. If you would
prefer no image compression whatsoever and are willing to live with
large montage files, then you may choose to output the montages using
the TIFF format. This is controlled under Preferences because users
who choose this often want TIFF output for every montage. When you
choose TIFF output the JPEG Quality slider set under Advanced
Options will be grayed out.
Layout Preference (Pro only)
If you find yourself having a tendency to prefer layout choices
different from those made automatically by i2k Quickage™, you can open
up Preferences and set the Layout Preference by indicating your
preference towards Perspective or Cylindrical. Go ahead try it! The
DualAlign team members themselves use different settings for this
Preference.
Show
Montage Preview
You may choose to not see the small preview montage after the full
montage has been generated and saved.
FAQs and Suggestions on Taking
Pictures
What about the Viewpoint?
Take the pictures from a single viewpoint by turning the camera more
or less in place. There is no need to be too precise about this; just
do what is easy and comfortable. A tripod is not needed. The further
away from the subject and the flatter the subject is, the looser the
viewpoint requirements are.
Is
there a pattern I should follow when taking pictures?
For the best results, take images in a pattern to ensure you cover a
roughly rectangular area. For example, if you are an i2k Quickage™
Express user, you might take a 2x2 grid of four pictures or you might
take 3 or 4 picture across. For 3 or 4 across, switching to portrait
mode can help ensure enough coverage. Of course, i2k Quickage™ itself
requires no pattern - it figures out the pattern for itself.
As an example, the first montage below was formed from four pictures
taken four across with an iPhone camera in portrait mode, while the
second
was formed from two rows of two pictures taken in landscape mode.
Yes. The montage will still be a flat picture, so some parts of the
scene will be repeated at each end. If you continue to turn two full
circles, then parts may even be repeated three times! This could lead
to fun artistic effects. If you would like to capture two rows of
pictures in a circle, then it would be best to take a top and a bottom
picture together at each stop while turning around the circle.
How
much overlap is needed between images?
There are no strict rules here. A good target is 20% - 40%. Less is
needed if there are visually-interesting objects in the overlap (e.g.
not just blue sky). If you can easily see commonality between the
photos, i2k Quickage™ will as well.
What about lighting?
Try to take the images under roughly the same lighting conditions, but
also don't worry about it too much. i2k Quickage™ can adjust for many
lighting differences, but large variations from bright sunlight to
shadows may lead to less pleasing results.
Do I need to worry about
movement in the scene?
i2k Quickage™ adjusts for most movement of people and cars and other
objects in the scene, avoiding "ghosting" and cutting out one or both
instances of the movement. If there is a lot of movement, it is best
to have a bit more overlap to your photos and take them without much
time delay in between. (You should also take photos with more overlap
when there are objects in the immediate foreground.)
How long will it
take the software to run?
i2k Quickage™ will create montages of 3 to 4 photos usually in a minute
or
less, and of 5-8 photos in one to three minutes. Exact times depend on
the specifics of your computer, on the size of the images, and on
the difficulty of creating a montage. i2k Quickage™ can create
montages of many more images (up to 24 on Windows, closer to 50 on
Macs), but the amount of time can increase substantially. Be patient
and you will have some visually-stunning results.
What if I mix in
pictures of other scenes?
Don't worry! i2k Quickage™ figures out which photos belong together and
creates a single montage of the largest collection. Later you can go
back and create montages of the other collections of images.
Where do I find my
photos?
On Mac OS X you can generally find your photos in the Pictures folder,
where both iPhoto & Picasa place the images. On Windows, there
will usually be My Pictures folder and it will usually be under My
Documents. Note that even if you use photo editing software to look
at your photos, they will be sitting on your computer in folders that
you can easily see and use in i2k Quickage.
