'Stitching' Digital pics.

Whats ya email addy,I'll send you a copy of PIXMAKER PRO...

fu_kew
at
hotmail
dot
com

many cameras come with software that stitches images and there will be freebies available, not that I can suggest one. A search on one of the many digi-photo sites (photo.net, dpreview, etc) will turn up the best contenders.

The stitching process can be assisted if you do a couple of things when taking the picture.
- If possible, lock the exposure at the one setting. This is doubly important if there's blue sky in the view as otherwise it will change colour/brightness slightly each time the camera uses it's 'brain' to determine the exposure, and you'll see it in the stitched panorama.
- Try to keep the camera level. A tripod that's had it's baseplate/head leveled works best. If doing this handheld, think about this as you swivel and try swivel the camera flat. Don't follow a mountain range up/down in the middle of the frame. You'll end up with a very skinny shot as too much needs to be cut off the top/bottom.
- Don't use too wide angle lens. Wide angle lenses tend to distort at the edges, which shows up when trying to stitch. Take more pictures with a more 'normal' view. A good technique is to zoom in to a 35mm eqiv of say 50mm, turn the camera into the portrait orientation and take extra frames to cover the view. This gives you more vertical pixels to work with.
- Don't skimp on the overlaps. The stitching program needs something to work with.
- if you really want to be a smarty-pants... rotate your camera around the nodel point of the lense... advanced topic! :)

To do it properly it is best to:

1. have a tripod
2. make and keep the camera level
3. rotate it around the nodal point of the lens (you probably need to google this to find out how)

and ideally:

4. have a panoramic head.
5. have your camera mounted in the portrait mode so that you maximise your vertical resolution or

6. take two or more rows of photos and stitch the rows

If your camera has manual controls:

a) set the white balance, aperture and shutter speed so as not to overexpose the brightest part of the scene and use this for all the pics (then you won't have banding in your image)
b) set the white balance

Finally, stitch with software that uses the information about the lens, and the angle of the camera to warp the image during stitching - this produces the best effect.

If you can, avoid windy days - trees on the stitch line with leaves that are moving make for circular blury lines.

For a bit of fun, put the same person, car, rock, teddy bear, etc. in each photo for a bit of a laugh.

There is lots of software available - free (eg. PanoTools), and inexpensive that does it, and a lot of cameras come with their own.

If you want to stitch snap-shots for displaying on your screen you can probably get away with little of the able, but the more you can do, the better the result.

If you really want to learn, ask me about personal training.

Ciao for now
Andrew.

www.panoguide.com/

Site Link

do a search on google for stitching and you get more than you can swallow ..

Most in camera and simple tools do not create very good results. It just depends what resolution and quality you are after .. for simple panos and the downsized to the web many solutions will do an ok job although with a bit of an eye you can mostly see the seems...

I do multirow high res panos occasionally and tried all sorts of different PC tools including Dersch's tools and a few commercial ones, but at the end of the day manual stitching in Photoshop does it for me. It takes a bit of getting used to
and the tips from the previous poster might help to get a good base ..

the rest is practise ... You want a decent resolution of your images and about 25-30% overlap of the images ...

its fun ... download a few tools and give it a shot

one of the better tools with a free trial

www.panoramafactory.com/

have fun
gmd

Also try this program
www.autostitch.net
This is free and uses a different technique to stitch shots together. Absolutely the fastest easiest to use stitching software. it is still being developed and is free until the commercial version comes out. Have a read of the info on their site about how it was developed. The free version only works with jpeg format. What is really cute about this program is that you don't even have to put the shots into the program in order - it automatically finds and stitches shots with matching points without you having to line them up. Auto discards any shots not in the sequence - and it's sreets faster than any other program I have tried.
I expect that the commercial version will correct lenses and exposures automatically and process other formats when it is released.

I second all the advice above, especially holding your camera vertically to shoot.
If your camera doesn't have an exposure lock, set it on manual, take a reading around the middle of the sequence you want to stitch, then take all your shots with the same setting. This keeps the exposure constant across the series so the colours/tones/contrast all match up. If you leave the camera on auto, the lighting tends to be different in each shot making stitching more difficult as the autoexposure will change your settings.