Topic: Photostitching software

[Richary]

Seeing the pretty amazing photo of the storm front in NZ that nzstorm just posted made me think this might be a useful link for those of us trying to stitch several pictures together to catch the whole picture.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

While some cameras come with stitching software it normally only handles one dimension at a time such as a horizontal row. This software allows 2D stitching, in fact all the way from 360 degrees around to 180 degrees up. Standing on a building at Cremorne Point I created a panorama that stretches from the Heads, round past the city, bridge, North Sydney and Crows Nest with 3 vertical frames which I thought was a pretty severe test.

Now for the even better news.

1) It's free

2) Amazingly it is under 1MB

3) You don't even need to tell it what order the photos go in, it works that out for itself

4) The blending of images is amazingly good despite that my photos were taken on auto exposure so would have varied frame to frame.

[Richary]

And another from the same location, looking NE mostly. With less horizontal direction and 3 frames high it makes a better looking pic but obviosuly doesn't cover as much area. Was going to try one from the SW Pylon of the Harbour Bridge last week but it was pretty hazy when I was up there so not good conditions. Next time I am up there and it is clear though will be trying some shots.

The first photo was about 30 frames stitched together, this is about 15. The only editing required was that because I was hand holding and moving around to avoid antennas etc on the roof the top and bottom ended up a touch jagged. A quick cut and paste in Paintshop fixed that up fine to give me the section I wanted.