The above panorama is all the proof we need, I'm sure. This came about because just after breakfast, a friend in the building here sent me some examples of pictures which had been 'photoshopped' beyond belief. I decided to try out one my programs, which could best be called 'a poor man's photoshop' and one of them didn't have a feature for splicing or merging images. That in turn got me looking for freebies on the web which might do that, aside from Canon's nice little PhotoStitch, which I already have.
I found a freebie demo made locally at the University of British Columbia, which is called 'Autostitch', and while it lacks a few bells and whistles, like an editing feature to clean up ragged edges in merged masterpieces like the above (just kidding, critics!) it does something Canon's program can't - it takes a whole bunch of images, in this case 13 of them, and automatically sorts them and then assembles them into one continuous panorama like the above. It then has to be trimmed in another editor program to even out the edges, but so what? It does the heavy lifting all by itself, and I think that's quite amazing. It's now being used as the basis for commercially sold programs, but this free demo is neat, and it won't bend your budget.
Want one? Have a look here for it.
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I have done this using Photoshop, with some great results. I noticed that they stated stitching together 57 images in this. I'm gong to give it a try because I've been unable (so far) to stitch a lot of images at once.
ReplyDelete@ Tommy:
ReplyDeleteI think you'll find that it works quite well. They say it matches the images both horizontally and vertically, to give the result a more natural appearance. I've used it a couple of times with up to 13 images, and it sorted them and put them together into one image without any help from me.
When it is done, you do have to use another editing program to trim up the uneven edges where it matches the images, but the matching is done really well. With Canon's PhotoStich, for example, you have to drag adjacent images into position and sometimes re-do it again. Not with this - it puts it all together into a seamless result which only needs some edge trimming to finish it off. I was really happy with the results, and I think you will be too.