A surprisingly nice free stitching program

bruto

Some cameras (the new D3300 among them) have built in panorama features, but many do not. It's a feature I have on my little point and shoot but lack on the D3200. For those who want a really wide angle shot, panoramas can be a useful substitute for a hugely expensive lens.

Various software routes are available for this, but one I just downloaded and tried which works very quickly and well is the freeware "Microsoft ICE". If you do a quick search for this, you'll find the page for download. If you stick in a couple of overlapping JPG or other format images, it will stitch them in a jiffy. It's a stand-alone program. So far I've only tried it on my Vista (ugh!) laptop, but it should work on many platforms and there's a MAC version too.

So far all I've tried it on is pairs of images made by flipping my old PC shift lens from full left to full right. Shift lenses are unique in that they do not change camera angle when they shift, and can make a panoramic pair without moving the camera at all. The results, though not ultra-wide, are very good with no apparent arc or fisheye effect. I'll try later with regular panning.

Anyway, I just figure that whenever a program this easy to use comes along, and it's free, it's a good thing to know about.

bruto

I have been playing a bit with the program and find it does a pretty good job of stitching multiple shots together. It easily will put together a half dozen or more shots, allowing one to stretch both horizontally and vertically. When you are shooting freehand and arcing the camera, you get a fisheye effect and quite a bit of linear distortion, but it works.

The advantage of this, aside from getting width without paying for exotic lenses, is that the resulting pictures do not lose density. File size is huge, but the pictures are hugely detailed too.

I was out shopping today and it got late and very cold, so I did not take much time to set up. I threw the tripod in a parking lot and made this shot with the perspective control lens to show how this lens can take a rectilinear pan. This is three shots made without moving the camera. It's overlapping so that the resulting shot is approximately double width, a 35mm lens providing a 48 megapixel picture with the width, but not the height, of about an 18. The stitch job here is uncropped, which is why the margins are a bit ragged.

No hot link here, because the image is large: https://app.box.com/s/0m4ypl13jwpnbc70jh9v

bruto

A quick update on this. The program works best on images carefully shot, and linear, and second best on images carefully shot in an arc with enough margin to crop vertically. It can do a pretty good job though, even on sloppy freehand shots. For grins, I provide this link to a vastly downsampled panoramic shot of Ushuwaia, the southernmost city in Argentina, as seen from the ship returning from Antarctica. The full stitched image was 44,900 pixels, over 7 normal images wide. As you can see, shot freehand from the ship, it results in a curved water line and the straightening of edges required cropping, but it stitched together correctly out of over 20 overlapping images. The drastic downsize results in a good bit of blur, but in the original you could easily read the name and port of the blue ship in the port (Asturiana from Panama).

Highly recommended for people who like to play with large files and high densities!

https://app.box.com/s/ripi04wn2n4ve6rfgkcl5gq4w3ggrwlg

Moose

Thanks for this @bruto! I've been wanting to recommend a good panoramic stitcher that wouldn't break the bank. I personally use the photomerge command inside Photoshop, but this can be too pricey of an option for those who just want to do pano's.