Creating panoramic photos with a regular camera - free and easy
This photo was created with 10 snapshots
A picture might be worth a thousand words, but sometimes you want even more. At Epcot, the World Showcase is a massive attraction that isn’t easily captured with a single photo. In this example, I’ve stiched together 10 photos with a regular digital camera to create a huge panoramic. It’s quick, easy, and painless… here’s how to do it.
The process is called photo stitching where you take regular, overlapping/adjecent photos and the computer finds similar features (The corner of a building, or a drain in the road, for example) on the photos and merges them together. Additionally, to make up for the different lighting values of the photos - blending is performed to make the panoramic seamless. Let’s see how to do it…
The EASY way
If you have a newer version of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, creating a photo panoramic is just a couple of clicks. Using a bunch of adjecent photos, load up Photoshop. Under File choose Automate and then “Photo Merge” I beleive Elements includes the Photomerge feature directly under file. In the window that opens, use the browse button to pick the individual adjecent photos you’ve taken. In this window you’ll see several layout modes with samples so you can help the program perform the mergeing in a way that will look best - but sometimes experimentation is the way to go. You’ll see a checkbox to blend the image. The blend process just fades the pictures together so you can’t see where they meet (you know, the lighting could be different in each - for instance) When you click OK the process will start, and can take some time. My 10 pictures from my 10 MP camera ate up almost 20 gigs on my sctrach disk - so having free space for this is a good thing. If you run into a problem you can shrink down your originals and still get a decent product.
The FREE way
Photoshop is a must-have program as far as I’m concerned but if you don’t have it you can still do photo merges - it’s just harder. There are plenty of programs online that will do the stiching besides photoshop, many rely on a common photo-stiching library. Perhaps a good place to start is here: http://www.all-in-one.ee/~dersch/
These process using these tools is similar, just manual. The separate photos are warped, stiched, aligned, blended. You may even find different programs you are comfortable with for different parts of the procedure - just do some googling.
More tools: Autopano, which can be easily found on google. PTGui is another (http://www.ptgui.com/) Another is AutoStitch (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html) — what it comes down to here is to google, try, and see which you are most comfortable with. Many are available for Mac/Linux/Windows.