AutoStitch Panoramas

Carolyn forwarded an email to me regarding a product named AutoStitch, which automatically stitches together photographs into panoramas.

I had some photos taken from our Auckland holiday, that I took with the intention of creating panoramas from them sometime, so I tried it out.

Unfortunately, because it does the stitching automatically, you can't guide it when it does the wrong thing. If the photos have sufficient overlap, and enough detail, then it works fine. Otherwise there are a small number of obtuse parameters that with much fiddling and regenerating, you may be able to get something acceptable.

My recommendation: download it, try it out for your panorama (do check the output size that you wish to generate before you begin), if it works with the default settings then that is great, otherwise try a different product.

The Gannet Colony photo is only two photos stitched together. AutoStitch had no problems with it.

The Whatipu photo was also produced without much trouble, however I had another panorama I took from another location in Whatipu where I accidentally just missed having any overlap between portions of it. AutoStitch completely refused to let me abut the photos, even though with very minor image enhancements that would have looked great. (The result of the remaining photos joined together looks good, but the interesting detail was in the single non-stitched photo, so I haven't shown the results here.)

I persisted with a large number of attempts to get (four) cave photos joined, trying different settings. Eventually I suceeded. The difficulty with these ones was the large difference in brightnesses.

I also tried to create a panorama of the Manukau Harbour from Little Huia (not included here). I had great difficulty with that one as I had an overhanging tree in the foreground, and hadn't taken care to keep the camera in the same place. In order to stitch the photos without the horizon having severe kinks in it, I had to crop out the overhanging branches.

From my experience using AutoStitch I learnt not to be so cavalier in my photo-taking in future when I take shots I intend to stitch together.

Here is a brief list of some things I was wishing I had paid more attention to:

1. Use the camera's panoramic mode so that the brightness, shutter speed, etc. stay the same for each photo (and hold the shutter half down when pointing at the mid-brightness part of the horizon, then turn to take the first photo).
2. Have sufficient overlap (if in doubt, overlap more).
3. Rotate the camera around a point close to the center of the camera's lens.
4. Keep the camera level so that less rotation is needed to stitch the photos together (resulting in more usable vertical pixels when cropping the result).
5. Try to keep close foreground features in a single photo, not overlapped.
6. Check to make sure you haven't left the camera adjusting its white balance for tungsten lights! (I take far too many outdoors photos that turn out looking turquoise!)

However I still think it's better to simply take photos whenever you like than worry about any of the above.

(Click the photos below to go to my Picasa Web Album, where the pictures can be viewed without being cropped. Full size images may also be downloaded... not sure why you would want those though.)

Gannet Colony at Muriwai

Whatipu

A Cave at Whatipu