PTOCLEAN(1)

📦
version 0.29 · 2 versions
, in fedora 43

💖 PTOCLEAN(1) 💖

okay bestie, you're in the User Contributed Perl Documentation corner of the man pages, and this one's a baddie. it's called ptoclean, and no cap, it's here to prune improbable control points. yes, literally.

✨ NAME ✨

ptoclean — prune improbable control points 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

ptoclean [options] --output better.pto notgood.pto

here's the whole options menu, bestie, every single one:

  • -o | --output — the filename of the pruned project that comes out the other side. lowkey iconic detail: it can be the same as the input, so you can just vibe in place 💅
  • -n | --amount — the distance factor for pruning, and the default is 2 ✨
  • -f | --fast — don't run the optimiser for each image pair (it's giving APClean energy, if you know you know)
  • -v | --verbose — report some statistics, for the nosy girlies 🍓
  • -h | --help — outputs help documentation, the classic 🫶

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so ptoclean takes a hugin .pto project and removes inconsistent control-points. the way it does this is honestly so smart: it calculates the average error distance and the standard deviation (Sigma), and then it removes any points whose error distance is greater than the average by n * sigma. that pruning happens on each pair of images in turn, and then finally on the project as a whole. periodt. 👑

and like, additionally, the autooptimiser tool is run on each pair of images separately before each calculation — which means your project does not need to be 'nearly aligned' beforehand. slay, no prep required.

NOTE: okay so even though optimisation plays a part in the pruning process, the output project is exactly the same as the input except with 'bad' points removed. so you probably want to optimise the geometry of this project with hugin or autooptimiser afterward. don't skip that step bestie, it's the main character of the workflow. 😭

this tool is heavily inspired by APClean, a similar tool for PTGui project files by Fulvio Senore. and if you want a similar behaviour to APClean without the optimisation steps, just use the --fast option. easy. 🦋

📜 LICENSE 📜

this program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Bruno Postle — August 2008.

and that's the whole vibe, bestie. this page was living in perl v5.42.0 land, dated 2025-07-25, and honestly? iconic of it. go prune some control points, you've got this 💖✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from