Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Panoramic Photos from Digital Images

The best part of digital photos (other than the price) is that there is so much you can do with them.

Tinkering and hacking.

Lately we've been playing with 'stitching' a series of photos together to make a panoramic composit.

Here is a shot from the Astoria Column last weekend.

Hugin is one of the free software packages out there for photo stitching. It is simple and straightforward to use, with very complex capabilities.

First, load all the series of photos you've taken. On each set of photos, identify 2 or 3 common points between them.

Easy.


This software makes it pretty easy to get the same point between photos.

After you've added 3 points, go on to the next pair of pictures, until points are shared between all consecutive photos.





Lots of other options to choose from, or just stick to the basics.

It took us about 10 minutes to stitch together a series of images.

It took almost as long for the software to automatically stitch the images together for us...




And here is the final result. Not bad...

Obviously the better images provided, the better the result. Lighting and distance were off on these, but it was a first try.

We'll put together some better ones to show later. Go give it a try!