tomputer » autostitch http://droza.net/blog Software. Gadgets. Music. Rants. By Tom D\'Roza Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:26:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Create 2D panoramic pictures with autostitch http://droza.net/blog/2008/04/02/create-2d-panoramic-pictures-with-autostitch/ http://droza.net/blog/2008/04/02/create-2d-panoramic-pictures-with-autostitch/#comments Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:18:54 +0000 tdroza http://droza.net/blog/2008/04/02/create-2d-panoramic-pictures-with-autostitch/

Here’s a recommendation for a piece of softare I’ve been using for a couple of years. Autostitch is a fantastic piece of software for creating panoramic images and the results are nothing short of amazing. I’ve tried several photo-stitching applications in the past: some require lots of manual intervention to approximately align the photos in the correct order, others produce distorted or blurry images. Autostitch has none of these problems, just import a bunch of pictures and it works out which of them are part of the same scene (it will exclude any that don’t fit but it’s quicker if you only select the images you want to join together), it works out which images need to go where, and it then creates a single panoramic image. Another great feature is that it can create 2-dimensional panoramas – most other applications only create 1D panoramas so the camera has to be panned in the x- or y-axis but not both. This is great for creating an image where you can’t get a wide enough shot to include the whole scene -for example when photographing a building on a narrow road where can’t position the camera far enough away to fit it all in. Oh, and did I mention that autostitch is free?

Millennium Bridge, London. Can you spot the joins?

The autostitch software is the result of a research project at the University of British Columbia and the technology has been licenced to other companies for use in commercial products – it’s even been licensed to George Lucas’ ILM for production of panoramic images for films. The free version has a quite a clunky interface with a bit of a “proof-of-concept” feel about and although it provides a ton of options for customisation the only think I ever change is the amount of memory that the app can consume (I usually allocate all the physical RAM in my PC), and the size of the output image (larger images take considerably longer to produce). The app itself is only 0.75MB to download, requires no installation and when the trial period expires just download a new copy!

The example images here are my own very basic efforts. For some really impressive images checkout flickr for images tagged with autostitch: flickr.com/photos/tags/autostitch

Ramsholt, Suffolk. Stitched from 4 separate images.

I have no association with autostitch other than as a user of the software.

www.autostitch.net

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