Photo Stitching

[SJCT]

What do you normally use for "stitching" together panoramic photos? I currently have Adobe Lightroom 3 but I'm not sure if it's possible within that program. I've also searched around on the net but haven't found any definitive answer. Help!

Thanks

[dlambert]

I've had good luck with hugin (free), and I've recently played with Photoshop Express, which seems to have pretty decent stitching support, too. Hugin isn't super-intuitive to use, but it's pretty powerful. I really like the ability to define straight lines in your photo - if you're doing a pano with buildings or other objects that are obviously supposed to be straight, this is really helpful.

[Jayman11]

Photomatix is real good. I don't do a lot of panoramas but have used that program a few times and was great. One of my buddies uses it to stitch huge backdrop prints together. It was able to handle 300 images.

[SJCT]

Thanks guys. Does anyone know if stitching is possible in Adobe Lightroom 3?

[zona5101]

Lightroom isn't the tool you want but if you had to you could go into the print module and line up your already cropped and aligned images and put them on one print layout with zero border. Still, not the same as stitching them together with Photoshop or similar tool.

[dlambert]

I've only been using LR3 for a month or so, but I haven't seen any facility like that. I wouldn't expect to find one there, given the way they've positioned it relative to PS.

[SJCT]

Thanks again. I think I'll give hugin a try. After all, the price is right.

[Krusty79]

If you search for photo stitching tutorials on YouTube, you'll see they have them for PS, Gimp (free!) & PaintShopPro.

I have also heard hugin is good.


You can also build your own panoramic tripod head to eliminate the parallax effect - http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials/161123/tutorial

[kcoppock]

I've had great success using Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). It's free, at least for non-commercial use, and does an excellent job of stitching given good input images. You can also readjust the projection if you're exporting to rectilinear, or you can upload it to the Photosynth site for free, and they provide a very nice 3D viewer (you can see some examples at the link in my bio, if you're interested).

The downside is that there's not any manual control, so if something goes wrong in the stitching, you can't go in and manually adjust control points or positioning. You can always export it to a Photoshop document, and do manual touch up, but it's just not as finely controllable as something like Hugin (which, honestly, I have yet to get decent results from, but I love the amount of control it gives you).

Anyway, for free, I'd definitely give it a shot!