Thursday, August 03, 2006

Comparing stitching methods


I love the auto panoramic feature of my Olympus camera. The big limitation is you must have a special card (supplied only my Olympus) to be able to use that feature. On the positive it is well thought out and it gives a reference guide over the image on the LCD to help you give the best overlap between shots. Once uploaded to the computer it is simple a matter of selection your series and pressing the create/auto panorama button. It is even fun to watch the images being positioned and the final product is generally good.

The big exception being when taking a strongly graduated sky the “seams” at the photo overlap are frequently visible in the sky.

So this time I also tried using the Autostitch program, and at least at the time of writing this, the demo version can still be downloaded for free for those who might be interested. Whilst it doesn’t show you what’s going on till it has finished. Compared with my Olympus auto panorama, I think it has done a better job with the blends between images (particularly) in the sky and the perspective is slightly different (layout out the outer images, a bit like a fan) Still I’m very impressed.


A small amount of straightening, cropping and using autocontrast in picasa and I have a nice wide panorama of the sunset

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