Note for anyone who wants to abuse their PC with this kind of crap: GraphicsMagick (which is an advanced port of ImageMagick) does in fact read and display very large image files. The default package however is only 8-bit/channel capable. To enable 16bit or 32bit/channel capabilities the software must be compiled from source code. You need both the file type libraries and the dev libraries for the image types you want to work with or your compiler will not include support for them (I had to go back and install the dev packages and re-compile). If you’re using Photoshop, you don’t need to worry, supposedly… I’ve not tested it (I’m a cheap bastard/Linux weenie), but comments I’ve seen indicate that PS supports gigapixel files.
Gigapixel images are, obviously, memory hogs. Simply displaying a 5GB TIFF ate up all 16GB of my RAM and another gig of swap. If you don’t need to view the actual file, as would be the case if you’re using an image server like you see on gigapixel websites, you don’t really need GraphicsMagick. ImageMagick can handle resizing, cropping, chopping, or whatever else you need to do to it from the command line.
I had an issue with my resized images (they needed to be small enough to display); they were not rendered correctly and I could not determine if the problem was with Hugin or ImageMagick without actually viewing the original full-rez file (which is why I needed to compile GraphicsMagick). I rendered reduced resolution files in Hugin without issue. My rendering issues appear to be from Hugin, but I’m running a 3-year-old version. I’m going to see about compiling the latest and try again.
edit: Sweet! No need to compile. If you’re running Ubuntu, use this:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hugin/hugin-builds
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hugin enblend panini
That gets you the latest stable build.
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