Saturday, July 31, 2010

Making really massive panoramas

IMGP4632_stitch (2)-1There is a new version of Mircosoft Research’s ICE (Image Composite Editor) package available. There are several new features but the  important ones are, it handles many images together better, is blindingly fast in the stitching and has a more stable upload to photosythn. I tried it out on this 15 photo panorama set and used the prespective projection. I took the series hand held slowly panning the camera. I didn’t use a gigapan or similar fancy tripod heads,  which aim to rotate the camera around the focal center of the lens, or in fact any tripod at all. Ice informed me that my resulting image spans 101.7 horizontally and 30.9 vertically. I haven’t cropped the image edges so you get a feel of the projection. It only took a few seconds. The resulting image preserved maximum detail all 318MB of it! One trouble with trying to work with an image that size, is few of my programs will even load it let alone manipulate it (one exception is picasa). Adobe photoshop essentials falls over loading it and interestingly so does Window photo gallery! Yet Windows Live Photo Gallery does display it but notes it is too large to edit! The image displayed here above is significantly reduced in size (using picasa)

To see the image in its fall glory (and massive full detail) your need to view it as a photosynth,

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