Creating Panoramic Landscapes

[the_iceman]

I was interested in doing a little panoramic creation with my camera and thought I'd look at the software the Digital Rebel came with (PhotoStitch). I started to look at other pieces of software (on the web) which are used to create panoramic photos and came across an awesome program called AutoStitch.

http://autostitch.net

This is a windows based FREEWARE (at least so far) program created by a few gentlemen from Canada (from what I gather). It is well worth the time to go and look at this site and download the software. I'll be giving it a try later on this week to see how it blends/stitches pics together. It almost doesn't matter how the exposures are. Some can be much lighter than others. It can blend them together perfectly from what I've seen. Seems the first image you need to load, though, is a 'center' type of image and it builds the pano from that image outward. As you will see from the first website page... it takes 57 different images and creates a beautiful PANO from it.

Go to the gallary page and look through the images. The smaller images don't look nearly as good as the large ones (click on the image link below each picture to get a full sized pano of that scene).

Anyhooooooooooooooo Just thought I would share some very good looking software used to create panos.

:)

http://flickr.com/photos/the_iceman

[SamuraiCatJB]

I just took a panorama and was trying to find my software to do it.... I will have to nab that tonight and try it. :)

[the_iceman]

ok... I pushed up 2 panoramic pictures (not the greatest... but what the heck).

1st is Mickey Mouse's House in Disneyland:

http://flickr.com/photos/the_iceman/5838940/

2nd is some California Landscape I took at a rest area:

http://flickr.com/photos/the_iceman/5839063/

These panos were created using autostitch as mentioned above by me in this thread. This is a great piece of software. I only wish I had gotten the sky and top parts of the house of Mickey when I took the pics. Because it has to 'bend/blend' the images to make the pano... I wasn't able to select out the top of the house but.. oh well.

If you go to the 'different sizes' you can see them full size. I see no virtually no 'banding' of the images.

Let me know what you think.

[SamuraiCatJB]

just ran mine finally.... :) the results were pretty good once I adjusted the output size. :D

but mine came out with far less green than yours... ;) ;) :p

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samurai_cat/5972424/

[SamuraiCatJB]

makes me think of doing a 1 gigapixel image by stitching tele-zoomed images... hmmmm.... :)

[the_iceman]

SamuraiCatJB,

Looks GREAT. That autostitch proggie is absolutely wonderful. In many aspects (trying it out) you don't have to worry much about the lighting as it does such a superb job with the blending and adjusting.

First pano I've tried where you just 'load the images' and it automagically does all the work for you.

There are other good pano programs out there but some are a little 'strict' in the images. You have to pay more attention to the exposure so the amount of 'banding' is reduced to a minimum.

Takes awhile to do the Pano... depending on the number of images, size of each image... output-size jpeg quality... etc. With it being freeware... it is by far the best I've seen for what it produces with minimal effort on the user of the program. Would be nice if they were to make a little better interface... etc and charge a few bucks for it. :)

[the_iceman]

makes me think of doing a 1 gigapixel image by stitching tele-zoomed images... hmmmm.... :) 1gigapixel... that would take some time for the image to be produced because you will need a lot of images to make a gigapixel picture. Landscape shots using a high zoom. Need a few memory cards, probably, to get that gigapixel picture and to have the same quality of the gigapixel camera out there... :)

I haven't done the math... but wonder how 'big' a gigapixel image is....... in bytes. Prolly very large... lol

but you are right.. would be fun to try. :)

[SamuraiCatJB]

one dvd was the storage for one image at the gigapixel site. :) I could do that. :D

[the_iceman]

I think I might needa lil more RAM to create one..... I only have 1gb or RAM... lol

[SamuraiCatJB]

I only have 1 gig... but I could easily upgrade to 1.5g.... :D

[Drunken Macleod]

Great find Iceman! I've got some old pictures from my trip to alaska about 16 years ago and have tried to splice the pics together using photoshop but never got it perfect or even looking halfway decent! there were only 3 pics in each one. The glacier was the biggest challenge as some of it was missing . I touched it up a bit. the rest are pure autostitch magic :)
http://www.jasontjohnson.com/Panoramas.html

Thanks a bunch!

DM

[the_iceman]

Great panos!!!!!!!!!! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Looking great. Love how AutoStitch works for panos. Seems one of the best ones out there... and free to boot! :)

[SamuraiCatJB]

Great panos!!!!!!!!!! weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Looking great. Love how AutoStitch works for panos. Seems one of the best ones out there... and free to boot! :)

free until someone licenses the technology... :(

but hopefully free for a while!