Photoshop Schmotoshop

I'll be the first to admit that I'm only a barely competent photographer. If it requires more than the power button and the shutter button, I'm lost. I know the theory behind white balance, shutter speed, ISO, and all that jazz, but I lack experience in putting those settings to use. Furthermore, in Photoshop, I get lost in all the buttons and layers. In light of that, here's a tip anyone can use for taking a few quickly snapped photos and making a panoramic image.

There are plenty of tools for stitching images together. I believe I read that Photoshop recently added this functionality, but my philosophy is why pay when it's free? I also choose to run instead of walk, and sit instead of stand. Anyway, a couple years ago I found a free tool that does a very good job. It's called AutoStitch, and it was the result of a research project at the University of British Columbia. The technology has been licensed by a few consumer applications. Some are mentioned on their website. Even ILM of Star Wars fame has licensed it for use in movie production. It's technically demo software that expires, but the only time it expired for me was when they released a newer version. To solve that, I just downloaded the newer version and problem solved. Also, the demo version supposedly has a few features disabled, but none that I've missed.

To use it is simple. First, you need some eligible photos. When I find a spot with a nice panoramic vista, what I do is start on the left. Snap the leftmost picture of what you want the final product to be. While you're taking that picture, eyeball an object on the right hand side of the frame. For your second photo, aim to the right, trying not to go up or down much, and align the object you chose so it's now on the left side of the second frame. Do this until you've captured the whole scene. Overlapping too much is really a possibility, as you'll see later.

Now that you have the content, it's time to fire up AutoStitch. It doesn't even require an install. Just extract the Zip file and run the executable. Click on Edit > Options, and change the Output settings so whatever you'd like. I usually set it to Scale the image based on a percentage, but I set the percentage to 100 so I get the full resolution. If I want, I'll downsize the image later with Picasa. After you've done that, just hit OK. Go to File > Open, and select all of the images you want to stitch. Once you click Open, it will start doing its thing and it will output pano.jpg in the same directory as the images you selected. Easy as that.

Here are a few examples I've done over the years. Click for larger images:

Pittsburgh from the Duquesne Incline.


From the top of Racoon Mountain pumped storage facility.


Bristol Motor Speedway.


The Pocket, Chickamauga, GA.


These are highly scaled down. I set the width to 1600 pixels when I downsized them. The full sized images are around eight megabytes and 15000x3000 resolution. A bit large for sharing through a web browser. The black borders are automatically generated by AutoStitch. You could easily crop the images and make them a perfect square without borders if you choose. I actually had a friend take one of these, crop it, and had it printed and framed. I haven't seen the final product, but he's very pleased. Cropping would definitely look better, but I opted to leave them as-is so you could get a better sense of how the program actually works. In this last one, I actually did two rows of five pictures. On the bottom row, I didn't overlap enough when I took the shot. You can see the resulting black blob trying to take over the waterfall. This is why I emphasize the fact that too much overlap is better than not enough.

If anyone would like full resolution versions of these photos, just PayPal me the sum of 5 million dollars. I'll send you a receipt. If you can't afford that, just ask nicely in the comments. Either way. Also, if anyone has another freebie suggestion comparable to AutoStitch, please, do tell.

Edit:
Turns out Microsoft has a good solution for this as well. Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you select multiple photos, go up to the top and select Make, and then "Create panoramic photo...:. Easy enough. So far the output is equivalent, though I haven't found as many options with Photo Gallery. It just outputs full resolution JPG at 100% quality. Fine for me since I like to save it in as high quality as possible then downsize with Picasa anyway.

Edit #2:
In relation to this post, I discovered an application that is handy for viewing 360 degree panoramic images. Called FSPViewer, you run it and open the panoramic image you've already created. It makes the image more like a point of view where you scroll around. Keep in mind that it expects 360 degrees of vision though. If it's anything less, it will look distorted.