Hi I'm Molly Wood from CNET.com and I have some great tips today from taking and stitching together panoramic photos without dropping several hundred dollars on Photoshop. Now even if you are using Photoshop, let’s start with some tips for taking a great panoramic photo.
Now, some digital cameras actually have onboard panoramic modes. On Canons for example, it’s called stitch assist. But you can always trust those photos to come out right and sometimes you’ll take this great series of images and then find these visible stitch marks between them. Most photographers recommend that you only use the panorama mode if it also stores each photo separately so that you can stitch it together yourself later.
First, the shooting tips: Make sure that your shooting settings are consistent. Manual exposure will keep the camera from auto adjusting the white balance and color settings between the shots or set your camera to another automatic setting like twilight or daytime so it will at least do consistent light balancing. Obviously, you don’t want to change your zoom or anything like that. Now find the element that you want to be the center of the image and use it to get the focus and the zoom right. Now, just pan over and start shooting.
Stay in the same place and pivet keeping your arms the camera steady. For a horizontal image, you want to shoot right to left in a steady row and try not to tilt the camera. That will make it harder to adjust later. For a vertical one, you obviously want to shoot top to bottom.
Now as you're shooting, look for water called anchor points. These are specific elements that are in focus and very easy for stitching software to pick out. Make sure you overlap each shot you take and overlap a little more than you think you need to, maybe as much as about 30%. This will also make editing easier because if you have any fuzziness around the edges of your image or some other unwanted items, you have a little bit of flexibility. Keep an eye out for moving objects like birds, cars, people or other elements in the scene that could change and try to minimize them if you want a consistent image.
Okay, now you should have a series of photos that you're ready to start stitching. And if you do have Photoshop CS or even Photoshop elements which you can find for about $80.00, there’s a great feature called photomerge and it does a pretty impressive job of stitching photos and correcting color discrepancies. But there are also some free programs that do a pretty good job too.
For Windows only unfortunately, the simplest thing to use is autostitch. You can find it at autostitch.com. And once you download the free demo version, you literally just double click the EXE file to open the app. Click file and then open, select the series of photos and boom! Just like that, it stitches them together.
If you’ve done a good job with your photo taking, you're pretty much done here. At a minimum, you have a stitched together image that you can save and work on in a free image editor like the Gamper, Google’s Picassa. Of you're on a Mac or you want a Windows alternative, you can use a program called Huggin and no I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce it. Huggin is a little more complicated to use but it lets you get really granular in terms of creating those anchor points or control points and if play with it long enough, you can get pretty good results.
There are a lot of pretty easy to follow tutorials at the Huggin site and also at lifehacker.com. and if you're looking for something web-based, the Wndows Live photo gallery does simple stitching again for Windows users and so does mag2.com for anyone.
And no, none of these will create photos as cool as the gigapen imager that David Burgman use to create the 1474 megapixel panorama of the Obama inauguration, but you’ll get there.
And that’s it for the CNET TV how to, I'm Molly Wood and you're welcome.
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