Panorama Photo

Mentor, what program and how do you scale the TIFF into the 500 pixel high JPG?

@Heinz. The PTgui TIFF file is saved in the Apple Pictures file. From there I move it into an Apple program called Photos. This organizes the pictures and panos but it also has a tool to make additional light, color, sharpening , crop corrections or to add text. In addition it has a tool to export again with choices like height, wide, TIFF or JPEG.. So I export from Photos a 500 px height TIFF file to the Pictures file again. I do this for 2 reasons. First, I do the sharpening with the Apple preview application which is easier than the Photos sharpening tool.. Apple preview is automatically used when one opens a picture from the Pictures file. Then I put the sharpened 500 px Tiff again in Photos and export a full sized (= 500px) JPEG.
However, this has no controle about the resulting file size so from time to time, the exported JPEG file surpasses the file limits of our lovely Panorama-PHoto site. In that case, I use the 500 px TiFF in the Pictures file and convert to a JPEG with the Preview application. This has a slider which controles the resulting file size. However, at maximum it often surpasses the limits of our site and the slightest lowering results into a minuscule file size. That is why I got here a remark about the small file size. So if possible I do the 500 px TIFF to 500 px JPEG conversion with the Photos application.

A very nice display of this still not fully explored phenomenon. No idea about your question since I use Autopano pro and Panoramastudio.
I have a quite small sensor (4/3), so I enjoy 500....1000px heights.
But this heights require extra optimization, such as unsharp masking and sharpening according to the situation for example.

Anyway, just be lucky to see such a sky by just looking out of the window :-)

PS. A similar display appeared in the sky yesterday evening quite south in Vienna, Munich etc...(cloudy here :-( )

Since the date is now around midsummer, it would most likely happen again this year. We have certainly had much clouds in the last 2 weeks, but last night just barely cleared enough to give some faint NLC's. BR Jan.

Mentor, Deine Vorgehensweise des Herunterskalierens mit dem Umweg über Apples Picture files kann ich leider nicht genau beurteilen, da ich das Programm beziehungsweise das File format nicht kenne. Es kommt ja dabei darauf an, daß man mit einem gut geeigneten Interpolationsverfahren arbeitet. Ob das bei Apples Picture file gegeben ist, muß man prüfen. Außerdem kann es sinnvoll sein, daß man beim Herunterskalieren schrittweise vorgeht.
Probiere das doch mal vergleichsweise mit IrfanView, das mehrere gut geeignete Interpolationsverfahren wie B-Spline oder Lanczos anbietet und außerdem ein Plugin bereitstellt, mit dem man die zulässige Speichergröße optimal erreichen kann.

Übersetzt mit Microsofts Bing Translator:
Mentor, I can unfortunately not exactly tell, your procedure of down scaling with the detour via Apple's picture files, because I know the program or the file format does not. It arrives, yes sure, that it works with a well suitable interpolation method. If this is given at Apple's picture file, you must check. Also, it may be useful to proceed step by step in the scaling down.
Try that yet even comparatively with IrfanView, which offers several suitable interpolation procedures such as B-spline or Lanczos and also provides a plugin that you can use to best reach the allowed memory size.

@ Heinz. Thanks for your input. I looked already to Irfanview but this program is only suited for Microsoft and not compatible with OSX. So I continue with the Mac tools for the moment. But what do you mean by: "proceeding step by step in scaling down"?

This means that you for example only demeans the height of 3695 pixels on 2000 then to 1000 and most recently at 500 pixels height. It may be useful to sharpen the interim result.

@Heinz. I didn't know that, so I will test it out. But wouldn't it be a great thing if this website increases the allowed pixel height to at least a minimum of 1000. I think it will do a small wonder to the quality at least for panos with a lot of height. Why making all these manificent and time consuming panos only to publish them at 500 px. I simply don't get it?

@ Heinz. I uploaded a step down version done as follows: 3695>1800TIFF>1000TIFF>500TIFF with sharpening>2211x500JPEG 735 KB. So this time, I did the sharpening only on the last TIFF because I saw on a pano in preparation that sharpening followed by a shrink and a 2nd sharpening yields distorted lines. But the stepdown as described, indeed yields a sharper and more colourful (especially the red spots) result even with a resulting lower file size.

Glückwunsch.
Ich warte noch auf gut sichtbare Nachtwolken.

Herzliche Grüße,
Dieter