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Automated Panorama Stitching with AutoStitch

2. Stitching your panorama

Autostitch only works with jpegs. If you don’t have images to stitch, you should read this article, and then make some. Autostitch can scan a directory of multiple images and find and stitch the multiple panoramas it contains. It has very basic controls, so a little preparation increases your chances of success.

• Separate your images of multiple panoramas of the same subject.

Autostitch can’t differentiate between multiple panoramas of the same subject, and will attempt to stitch them all together so move them into separate folders.

• Rotate your portrait oriented images

It also doesn’t rotate images very well, so you should rotate them before stitching .

• Fix white balance and exposure.

If you used automatic white balance and exposure, one or two in a panoramic series might be a little dark, or have a color cast to them. Fixing them before stitching gives you more control, and fewer surprises.

• Resize to final output.

If you know you are only going to need a small version of the panorama for web display for example, resizing the images by 50 percent or more will lower the chances of memory issues, and speed up stitching.

Getting Started with Autostitch



Use File>Open to select the images you want to stitch. This can be multiple panoramas, as long as there is not any overlap between the final output. Give it a try. The software generates an image in the original directory named pano.jpg. It also attempts, with varied success, to open the image in your default image viewer. In any case you can open the image yourself from the directory and take a look. You will need to rename any panoramas you like before running autostitch again, because it will overwrite any pano.jpg in its output directory. You may get memory errors after stitching a few times. Just restart the program to clear everything. However, you will lose any settings you changed in the options menu. 
 
Setting Autostitch Options

For better results, you should tweak the option settings. The readme.txt file that comes in the zip pretty well explains the software options, found under Edit>Options. I will paraphrase here.

• Output size

Start small and increase the size if you like the results. Twenty-five percent is good for five or six 3 megapixel images, but usually I would start at 10%.

• Blending Mode

Multiband is the only choice. Get the best quality you can. I leave the default settings for bands and sigma.

• Gain Compensation

Leave it off. You corrected it before the stitch.

• Auto Crop

It usually works ok, so I leave it on unless I am having problems.

• Auto Straighten

Again, it usually works ok, so I leave it on unless I am having problems.

• Image Rotation

Leave it off, we manually rotated before the stitching.

• Other Options

I usually increase the memory to half of my system RAM, and use 100 for the best quality jpeg output.

3. Results with Autostitch

I fed 20 images into Autostitch, and eight were stitched into a panorama. Here is what I got:

It is a 360 degree stitch, handheld, taken in part from the back of a bicycle. Stitching quality is great, and the image captures the landscape. There are a couple of ghosts due to people moving and it needs a good cropping. Most people are in the shot twice, while one person is in it three times. I will admit that it didn’t go up on my wall, but it did get me started on my journey into panoramic photography, and I didn’t have to buy any software or hardware.  If you want to see impressive numbers of great autostitch panoramas, head over to flickr. The lesson here is that, in many circumstances, you can use free software to stitch a series of digital photos into a panorama without a lot of forethought. Give it a try.

Additional Panorama Resources:

The Panotools Wiki tutorials cover many aspects of panoramic photography, with an emphasis on …(drum roll please) … panotools and related software. Panotools is the real deal, and you can’t go wrong browsing around. The tutorials are marked by difficulty from beginner to advanced

PTgui is another well regarded panotools interface

Canon PhotoStitch is a free and easy autostitcher that comes with Canon cameras.  Here are a couple of links for more information: #1, #2

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This article was written on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 and is filed under Mastering Skills. For more articles about: panoramic photography (3), Photography (6)

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