View Quickage 1.1 Support Page
i2k Quickage™ was designed to be extremely easy to use, with a user
interface so simple that it does not really require a 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.
Sometimes, however, you need to know a bit more to obtain the best
results on some image sets, and sometimes it is interesting to look
under the hood a bit. Hence, we have created this page with
explanations about running the software, the Montage Options, the
Preferences, and an FAQ.
Getting Starting
Montage Options
Preferences
FAQs and Suggestions on Taking Pictures
Getting Started with i2k Quickage™
Trial Mode
When you first run i2k Quickage™
you will start in trial mode,
allowing you to test the software for up to 5 days or 25 montages,
whichever comes first. Montages generated during trial mode have
subtle watermarks added to them. These watermarks are not added to
montages that you generate after purchasing the software. Trial mode
also allows you to switch back and forth between the Express and Pro
versions of i2k Quickage™ and decide which is right for you.
At
the
start of trial mode you will be asked to enter the email address you
used when downloading the software. This address must only be entered
once and is only used by DualAlign™ to know when you have started the
trial.
Express vs. Pro
i2k Quickage™ comes in two
versions, Express and Pro. Express allows
you to create montages of up to four images at a time, which is quite
useful for obtaining digital wide-angle shots. Pro allows an
arbitrary number of images to be combined into a single montage, with
a few more options on the formation and output of the montage. You
may switch back and forth between the Express and Pro versions of i2k
Quickage™ during the trial period in one of two ways:
- Restart the software and select the version to test, or
- Click on Trial from the main menu and then Select Trial version.
Generating a Montage
Generating a montage in
i2k Quickage™ is easy!
- Click on the Load Images button and then select
the folder containing the photos you wish to combine in a montage. The
name of this folder will appear to the right of the icon, and all of
its photos will be shown as thumbnail images in the main i2k Quickage™
window. Note that all photos that i2k Quickage™ combines to form a
montage should be in the same folder.
- Select the photos to combine in the montage by
clicking on each thumbnail individually. You may click on a thumbnail a
second time to deselect a photo. Use the buttons and tools at the
bottom of the display to select all photos, to invert your selection,
to clear your selection, and to increase or decrease the size of the
thumbnails.
- Click on the Generate Montage button and the main
work of i2k Quickage™ will start.
- The full-sized montage generated by i2k Quickage™
will be saved to an image file in a location of your choice. It
will also be shown in a preview window, which allows you to zoom in and
out on the montage and scroll across it.
If you want to generate a second montage using
different photos in the
same folder, either click Clear in the bottom tool area, or click the
photos you used for the first montage to deselect them. This step is
unnecessary if the photos you want are in a different folder; you just
need to select a new folder by clicking the Load Images
button.
i2k Quickage™ Interface - Preview Window
i2k Quickage™ offers you two ways to drag & drop photos to start
the montage process.
- First, if i2k
Quickage™ is currently not open,
you may click on two or more image files, drag them to the i2k
Quickage™ icon, and drop them. i2k Quickage™ will start automatically,
check to see if the software is in trial mode if necessary, and build
the montage. Your
saved preferences will guide the process.
- Second,
if i2k Quickage™ is
currently open, you may simply drag & drop the image file names
onto the thumbnail area to launch the montage process.
Purchasing and Activating i2k Quickage™
In order to purchase i2k Quickage™, you must purchase a 16-bit
activation code from the
i2Align™
website. Here are the steps you need to take:
- Click
on Order Now from the i2k Quickage™ Trial dialog or go directly to the
i2Align™ website.
- Place an Order.
- You
will receive the 16-bit code via email. Note that the email with the
code may
take up to 15 minutes after your purchase to arrive in your Inbox.
- You
may activate i2k Quickage™ by typing in the 16-digit activation
code you received. You can do this when you start or restart the
software from the i2k Quickage™ Trial dialog, or by clicking
Trial->
Standard Activation from the main menu.
If have
trouble
activating, and make several unsuccessful attempts, you may run our
manual activation process instead by clicking Trial-> Manual
Activation or by switching to manual activation from the Activation
dialog. This process should only be required for customers with
atypical internet connections.
Montage Options
A few options give
you control over
the behavior of i2k Quickage™ on individual sets of photos. You may
access these options by clicking on the Montage Options tab next to
the thumbnails. Additionally, you may set
several
preferences to
change the behavior
of i2k Quickage™ across all sets of photos. These are accessed through
the main menu. Your options and your preferences are saved when you
quit i2k Quickage™ and are restored when you start it again. Some of
these
options and preferences are only available for i2k Quickage™
Pro.
i2k Quickage™ Pro interface - Montage Options
Layout Option
The most important option
is the layout, which essentially determines
how the images are combined, or "laid out", relative to each other.
Experimenting with these and understanding their behavior can improve
your montages. i2k Quickage™ offers four layout modes:
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 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 of the montage 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 Reposition creates a seamless montage, it
is the best choice of all, but look at your results carefully. Also,
on rare occasions, reposition may be the ONLY layout option that
works
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
foreground 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, when working in the Auto
Layout mode, i2k Quickage™ 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.
Crop Options
When i2k Quickage™ aligns the photos to form the montage, the outlines
of the photos will form an irregular shape, especially when many
photos are being combined. Most users will want to have this montage
cropped and i2k Quickage™ can do this for you automatically, by finding
the largest rectangle that can fit entirely inside the montage.
Whether or not this
cropping is applied to a montage can be controlled
under the Crop Options.
- When Auto is selected, i2k Quickage™
will crop the
montage to
this rectangle if a large enough percentage of the montage is inside
the rectangle. In i2k Quickage™ Express this "large enough" percentage
is 70% (the rectangle in the picture above is 71%). In i2k Quickage™
Pro, this threshold percentage can be adjusted through the Preferences
dialog.
- When Always Crop is clicked, i2k
Quickage™ will always crop the
montage to the largest rectangle it can fit inside the montage, no
matter how irregularly shaped the montage is.
- When Don't Crop is clicked, i2k Quickage™ will not
crop your montage.
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 the photographed scene has significant brightness
variations, with photos being taken in and out of shadows.
The Radiance Image is akin to a High-Dynamic Range image, although it
is 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 TIF image (ordinary TIF 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 darkening of the sky and the shadows that appear 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,
accessed through the main menu, 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
i2k Quickage™ Pro allows
you to output the montage as either a JPEG or
a TIF image. JPEG is the default, but it compresses the image files
and loses some quality. TIF images are not compressed, and are
therefore stored in much larger files. TIF images are 8-bit unless
you choose to save the montage as a radiance image.
If you are an i2k Quickage™ Express user, or if you are a Pro
user and have selected the JPEG format, you still may make a choice
about the size of the image files i2k Quickage™ saves. JPEG allows 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 Preferences.
- Sliding
the bar to the left will result in smaller montage files, but
eventually the montages will start to have a "blocky" appearance.
- Sliding the bar to the right will result in larger files, but
higher quality photos.
For most
applications, the default setting of i2k Quickage™ is just
fine. On the other hand, 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%.
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.
Auto-Crop Preference (Pro only)
The montage
crop options allow you to
choose between cropping, no cropping, or allowing i2k Quickage™ to
automatically make the decision about whether or not to crop. During
the cropping process, i2k Quickage™ finds the largest possible
rectangle that fits inside the montage. When you have
selected "Auto", i2k Quickage™ compares the size of this rectangle to
the size of the overall, uncropped montage. If this rectangle
occupies a large enough percentage of the overall montage, then the
montage is cropped. You can control this threshold percentage by
sliding the Auto-Crop Preference bar:
- 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, just as though you had selected
"Don't Crop".
- 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.
Show Montage Preview
You may choose to see or
not to 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.)
What image formats may be used?
i2k Quickage™ allows the
input photos to be in many common formats,
including JPEG, PNG, PNM, BPM and TIF (8-bit). Output formats are
currently only 8-bit TIF and JPEG and, for radiance images, 16-bit.
Future generations of i2k Quickage™ will expand the set of both input
and output formats.
Why are some pictures missing from my montage?
While i2k Quickage™ will
form a montage from the vast majority of photo
sets, sometimes something goes wrong:
- Did you select all the photos you needed? Sometimes users
accidentally fail to select one photo, and leaving this photo out can
break a chain of photo in two. i2k Quickage™ will create a montage from
the photos in the larger half of the chain.
- Is there too much movement? For example, i2k Quickage™ may
have trouble montaging two photos of the leaves of a tree taken on a
windy day.
- Are there common structures in the overlap
between photos? i2k Quickage™ needs something distinctive to tie photos
together. Sky, water, and blank walls are not enough.
- As a last resort, under Montage Options, select
Reposition as the Layout. An example when this may work is montaging
photos taken across water, where only the buildings or hills on the
opposite shore are common between the photos.
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™.
