Stitching together photos has always been a fun way to share the spectacular vistas we've seen with others and in the age of scanners and digital photography, photo stitching has also become much more accurate and easy.
No more getting out the scissors, paper and glue to arrange landscape photos that never really seem to fit together. Once your photos are on your computer, whether you downloaded them from your digital camera or scanned in your prints, you can use stitching software such as the new Stitcher EZ plug-in for ACDSee to combine your photos into a single panorama automatically. This kind of automatic stitching software removes the meticulous and time-consuming element that used to be involved with manually stitching photos using image editing software.
Even when planning to use automatic stitching software, for the greatest amount of success, there are still a few things to remember:
1. Avoid Too Much Overlap: The more one photo overlaps with another, the harder your stitching software will have to work to match the images and the likelier it is that noticeable blurring may occur. This is especially the case if you are capturing lots of detail in the foreground or middle ground. Find a landmark towards the edge of your photo that you can use as an overlap marker.
Digital camera users should also compensate for any differences between what you see in the viewfinder or on your LCD screen and what actually ends up appearing in the photo. Unless your camera has TTL (through the lens) image capture, and most don't, there will be some variation. Once you figure out what that variation is, it will be easy enough to compensate for it.
2. Maintain Height, Angle and Position: Use the same height and angle for each photo and take each photo from the same spot. Unless you are using a tripod, it will be difficult to be totally accurate with this. Simply remember that the more differentiation there is between the height and angle of each photo, the smaller your end product will end up being and the likelier it becomes that it will include distortion.
3. Match Brightness: Since taking multiple shots of the horizon often means having the sun's light entering your camera at different angles and levels of intensity, the resulting photos will usually show the sky at different levels of brightness. While some difference is OK and even natural, it is better to match brightness levels somewhat before stitching photos together. Simply use a tool like ACDSee's Levels and make some quick adjustments to match brightness beforehand for improved results.
Below are examples of photos before and after stitching using the Stitcher EZ, a new ACDSee plug-in that makes stitching your photos fast and fun. As you can see the height and angle matched quite well. The photos below were also matched for brightness prior to being stitched.
Use the link at the bottom of this page to check out Stitcher EZ.
Use the link at the bottom of this page to check out Stitcher EZ.
