I was going to just blog about the most excellent, if quirky, panorama-photo-stitching program Autostitch, which I have only just discovered because I am much lamer than these people, but the post ended up being so big that I ran it as a Dan's Data review instead.
If you've got any +5 Insightful things to say about panorama-making with Autostitch or anything else, or would just like to link to your awesome browser-paralysing 10,000 by 10,000 pixel QTVR image, please comment below!
19 November 2006 at 6:52 am
The free "panotools" and their wrapper "hugin" along with "enblend" and "autopano-sift" (what is it with software names?) do an excellent job for me. Sometimes they need a little assistance, but they're fairly good at being able to integrate human assistance with automatic fitting, and they allow you to create spherical panoramas as well as all the other usual options. You can even use them to align pictures for "fake HDR photography". I don't know if they work on any non-Linux platforms, though.
The also come with a java-applet for viewing browser-paralyzing panoramas (that one was not taken with a hand-held camera).
19 November 2006 at 6:54 am
Excellent. I looked through my picture files and found so shots of my driveway being laid. Ran the program, it found a couple it could use. Wierd result, but I now see many possibilities.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
19 November 2006 at 9:57 am
If you really want to have some fun, check out the retail version of Autostitch. It's called 'AutoPano Pro'. It's an incredible bit of kit; no memory problems, HDR combining, PSD output, and with all the annoying parts automated.
Moreover, it's better than Autostitch with near objects. I took 24 pictures of my room with a DSLR at 18mm from a doorway and it had no trouble piecing them together. Sample here:
http://www.daveindech.com/roompano.jpg
I'm in the middle of a two week cram session, you're not allowed to poke fun.
The final picture was 10500x8000. It took about 30 minutes to render on a 2.4 GHz Athlon X2. I didn't actually expect it to come out; when I first tried this with Autostitch, it gave me my room as seen on an LSD trip.
Because this version was originally a layered PSD, it would have taken only about ten minutes to clean up the residual haziness. The justifications to use PT Assembler are becoming scarce indeed..
David
20 November 2006 at 3:35 am
The Three Sisters has been done already. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Blue_mountains_-_three_sisters.jpg
I took this one about 18 months ago. The angle of view isn't nearly as wide but the detail is a little better and it was taken at dusk so the colour is a bit cooler (and bluer!). Its been significantly downsampled but the original is probably around the 10000x7500 mark or perhaps a bit more.
20 November 2006 at 9:46 pm
Occurred to me Autostitch would be great adjunct to a mobile phone - and so it is. Did a bit of experimenting with 6-frame pans this morning and it works a treat. It doesn't turn a fixed-focus 2 meg camera phone into a Canon but it really does add to its usefulness.
21 November 2006 at 10:25 am
Nice review of Autostitch. I've been using it for awhile now, too, and can't imagine going back to any of the other options I tried before. I didn't go so far as to post the JPEGemoth image you did, but I have a decent webish-sized stitch on my own review over yonder.
23 November 2006 at 12:14 am
I've been using panotools and Hugin for a while now, and while I pretty much only use it to stitch panoramas together, it can also be used to change the perspective of photos, as in this tutorial. I also saw a demo of a photo of hieroglyphics within an egyptian tomb being perspective-corrected, which was very impressive, but can't find that one any more.
I've also used panotools to align a bunch of time-lapse photos, to then be able to assemble the result into an animation...
29 November 2006 at 12:29 pm
Hi, yet another (Linux) panotools user here. Hugin (with autopano) seems to everything that autostitch does, plus gives you the option of multiple projections (equirectangular, rectilinear, mercator, etc) to choose for your output image. It also makes it easy to align your panorama so that verticals remain vertical, and the horizon doesn't turn into a banana (a frequent problem with the software that came with my Canon). It also calculates and compensates for barrel/pincushion distortion from the camera (small amounts of barrel distortion is common with most cameras at the wide-angle end of the zoom).
matt: the I think the perspective-correction demo you're thinking of is here.