Creating Panoramas on the pc

[josealb]

This is an article from my blog Understanding Photography on how to create panoramas, I hope you find it useful


When we see panorama pictures we tend to think that these are taken with very specialized equipment. While this might generally be true, there are very easy ways of creating our own high resolution panorama with only a point and shoot camera or even a camera phone.

In this post. We,re going to learn how to use Hugin, an open source program, to create our own panoramas.

First of all we have to take the pictures. You need to take several pictures, as many as you want, that overlap themsleves partially on the sides, like this:



The overlapped area doesn't need to be as big as in the example, it will be enough with overlapping 30% of the image.

This will help the software find similarities between the images in order to stitch them together properly.

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[josealb]

Now we will install the program. Download the installer from here. Once the program is installed, launch it and load the images you want to use for your panorama. Click on the load images button. Once you have selected the images, the program will start to align them automatically, if not click on the align button. This process may take some time depending on your computer and the size of your images, once it's finished you'll be presented with an image like this:



You can adjust the margins here so that you've got no black background, but I recommend you fix this in photoshop or any other editing program later. When finished close this window.

Now you only have to click on Create panorama. Select the folder and filename and you're done. Hugin will automatically stitch the images together and blend the margins making it look as a single image. When the process finishes, as before this may take some time, you'll have you image saved in .tif format.


Open it in your favourite editing software, cut off the black areas and you'll get something like this:

As you see this tecnique requires no special equipment and is very easy to learn. You can use any shots you want even those from a camera phone if the quality is enough. This is what I got from a couple of shot taken with an N95.

If you want your image to be of even higher resolution you can take the shots vertically, which will allow you to use more shots to put together the same field of view. This example is made with 5 vertical shots put together.

So, as we've seen it's very easy to create your own panorama shots by just shooting consecutive images and then stitching them together on the pc. Next time you go shoting landscapes, give it a try!

[D40man]

i cant get the program installed, how do i do it?

[rediguana]

The link provided above by the original poster appears to be an older version from May. Try downloading and installing a newer version from the official Hugin website.

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

The most recent release (0.7.0) came out just a week ago. And it supports Mac, so just about to try it myself

[D40man]

well i figured it out. and i like it. kind of a weird end image.

couldnt figure out how to get rid of the black though.

[vandergus]

I think the black is inevitable. It's just a by product of forcing all of the images onto a certain projection (cylindrical, equirectangular, etc.). I just crop it off when I load the image back into my main photo library software. It's also good to remember that you should leave plenty of room at the top and bottom of your image when you are taking the initial shots. That way you can crop off the unwanted black boarder without losing anything important.

[D40man]

i guess ill just have to put up with the black then, i dont have any editing software lol.

[morts]

A simpler method of doing panoramas is using AutoStitch (google for it).
It will automatically stitch everything with unerring accuracy. You don't even have to align your shots - you can feed it a bunch of of photos of the same location and it will stitch them.

Take the result, put it into GIMP/PS and crop the black border and voila!

[blarg]

Download GIMP www.gimp.com and you'll be able to crop the black out.

For panoramics, I use Canon photostitch and this automatically crops the image for you. Great little program.

[josealb]

Originally Posted by morts

A simpler method of doing panoramas is using AutoStitch (google for it).
It will automatically stitch everything with unerring accuracy. You don't even have to align your shots - you can feed it a bunch of of photos of the same location and it will stitch them.

Take the result, put it into GIMP/PS and crop the black border and voila!

Hugin does exactly the same and i personally prefer it over Autostitch, but everyone has his own tastes.

Also, for those who don't have editing software (I'd download GIMP if you like photography) but if not you can always crop the image in hugin already. In the align section just move the horizontal and vertical slider to crop it.

If after cropping you find your image is too wide, you can also shoot the images in portrait mode, that way you'll be able to create a more standard sized picture