Good graphical scenery editing tools?

[bob.bernstein 0]

Nice pic, btw...and I understand what you are shooting for. What I've been thinking you were likely to do was to limit the area of flat polygon to the local area around the airport. That's where you be able to see high res like your photo shows.Not having keyhole, I'm unable to know what that imagry would look like, but I'm guessing you can have an image centered over your airport without running into your stitching problem....perhaps I'm wrong.Its the area surrounding the airport, I would recommend you design using the sdk tools. These limit you to 4.8m/pixel, which really looks great from 1000'....commonly you be that high once past your polygon. Its those areas that it appears to me that your right now trying to stitch. For these areas, imagry higher res than 4.8 does you no good. If you step the res down to at least 4 or 4.5, you'll have many fewer stitching headaches. Blending the poly to the background is easy...I can help there but lets get you further down the road.B

[Guest stele]

>I don't know what extent of area you are trying for, like how>many of the panels such as you posted are you trying to>composit? Could you reduce it to a small problem by working>with lower res imagry, and then just apply a rotation to>assemble a small number of panels?I'm willing to start with one large image with a smaller resolution, just to get started. Now, if I grab this image off keyhole, I still have the distortion problem (where the longitudes at the UL/BL and UR/LR corners are not the same. So I still need a tool to correct for this, if I'm going to be able to use a tool like TerraBuilder. Don't the SDK tools assume that the lattitudes are the same for the TL/TR corners and the longitudes are the same for the TL/BL corners, for example?If I understood this part of what it requires I could probably continue.

[Holger 0]

Hi,those differing coordinates are really confusing as an equirectangular projection should not have those. It might be rotated (e.g., using magnetic North instead of true North) but should not be distorted, yet those coordinates you listed indicate both a rotation and a distortion (e.g., the latitude difference differs between left and right edge).With that problem I suggest you look at that package of DOS executable GIS routines listed in the reprojection thread: http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal Hopefully, it will give you the option for georeferencing Plate Carree or whatever your image is actually in; I've never used it myself. Another option is to download the demo version of Global Mapper (it doesn't expire): http://mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov/drc/dlgv32pro/index.html It allows for georeferencing and re-projecting any kind of image, however the demo doesn't allow for saving. Thus, you'd have to do the screenshots-stitch-together thing again unless you pay US$300 or so for the full license.Cheers, Holger

[Bruce Nicholson KMFR 20]

Hello,I'll start by saying I'm not a scenery designer, and my suggestion does not take into account the coordinate issue that Holger discusses.However, I process plenty of digital photographs using photoshop and I may be able to offer a solution.When shooting photos of buildings at the base looking upward, the edges of the building have a wider perspective at the bottom of the photo than they do at the top of the photo. I'm seeing a similar shift in perspective for the north-south roads in the earlier presented photo. If I understand correctly, the user wants to stitch the photos together so the roads and textures align.The way I fix my photo with the skewed building perspective is to load the photo into photoshop and expand the canvas so I have some extra working room outside the edges of the photo. Then I select the edges of the photo with the marque tool, go to Edit|Transform and select either Skew, Distort, or Perspective from the Transform menu (depending how I want to alter the photo). Transform Perspective may work best in this case since west and east edges should be skewed by the same amount.You should be able to "stretch" the bottom of your photo so the roads and textures match the adjacent photo. If you use Photoshop layers and change the transparency, it will make it very easy to align the roads and textures with an adjacent image.When you have the correct perspective, crop the photo so the edges are straight, and save as your new working photo.You won't be able to use the same coordinates on your newly cropped photo, but you should be able to determine the new coordinates from the adjacent photo you used for alignment purposes, i.e., adjacent SE corner = cropped SW corner.I haven't tried this technique on the aerial photo provided, but it does work when I need to stitch photos that have an upward or downward perspective from the horizontal. Same should apply to perspectives off of the vertical or when using a cylindrical projection (similar to a wide-angle lens).Give it a try before plopping down $300 or monkeying around with multiple screen captures.Bruce

[scott967 62]

Looking at that Keyhole page, it does appear that the source data are in the correct datum/projection, but perspective is applied in the viewer, so I think the approach of removing perspective in the graphics editor is probably the right direction. That's assuming that the Keyhole nav controls were set to North up/ Top down befroe capturing the image. I don't see anything in the keyhole documents suggesting that images can be exported to GIS software -- probably their business model doesn't support that idea.scott s..