How can I combine and align overlapping images?

[elindarie]

I tried using the "Exact Aligner" script, the "Image Registration" plugin, and Hugin, but none did what I'm trying to do.  Has anyone tried the following?

What I'm trying to do is combine two images.  They're very similar and have lots of overlap, but slightly distorted, and this is very obvious in the detailed areas.  One image is high-resolution, but with a washed-out color palette.  The other is low resolution (kind of blurry) but with better colors.  When I try to combine them with the Exact Aligner or Image Registration, they still end up unaligned.  When I try Hugin, it fails in the Enblend stage, saying there's excessive overlap.  One website says to use an older version of Enblend, but I've found in other cases that older versions can cause problems.  I also tried Hugin's builtin blender instead of Enblend, but still had difficulty.

Does anyone know how to combine two similar images to keep the high res details of one and colorize it from the other?

Or does anyone know of an Enblend substitute that can deal with a lot of overlap?

Is there some sort of Image Registration that allows the user to set control points?

An Exact Aligner that can take more than two pairs of control points?

Thank you in advance for any help.

[Ofnuts]

Exact-aligner just does scale/rotate...

I was going to suggest Hugin. But may you are using too many control points (or let Hugin generate too many)?

A completely different technique could be to distort the "color" layer manually in the relevant areas with the Cage tool.

[elindarie]

Hi Ofnuts,

Thank you for your suggestion.  I appreciate it.

The problem with Hugin was that the Enblend part rejected the excessive overlap because the pictures are nearly the same.

Thank you for telling me about the Cage tool.  I looked at a couple of YouTube videos about it, but I'm not sure how to use it to deform one layer to be exactly superimposed on the other layer.

Linda

[Ofnuts]

(01-09-2017, 05:42 AM)elindarie Wrote: Hi Ofnuts,

Thank you for your suggestion.  I appreciate it.

The problem with Hugin was that the Enblend part rejected the excessive overlap because the pictures are nearly the same.

I have the hazy memory of hearing about Hugin being used to achieve image overlap in other aplications (denoising by averaging pictures, focus stacking, etc...), so maybe you are just missing a parameter.

(01-09-2017, 05:42 AM)elindarie Wrote: Thank you for telling me about the Cage tool.  I looked at a couple of YouTube videos about it, but I'm not sure how to use it to deform one layer to be exactly superimposed on the other layer.

The idea isn't to distort the whole layer, but the parts that count. When you do something like this, I assume the color layer is only in "color" mode so some bluriness is acceptable.

[Kevin]

You can certainly get Hugin to just do alignment manually:
https://discuss.pixls.us/t/aligning-imag...hugin/2609

And using the align_image_stack command for creating super resolution images:
http://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-How-can...ing-images