How to create panoramas using free software

Posted on April 24, 2008 at 5:29 am

Making a panoramic image from multiple digital photos is something that I have always enjoyed doing because it makes me feel like some kind photography professional! Using some free software and taking a few pictures with a little care, you can create some pretty fantastic looking wide-angle landscapes.

The cool thing is that you really don’t have to know much about photography in order to create panoramic images, you just have to keep a few simple rules in mind when taking photos. Before you begin the process of creating your own panorama, read through the following tips first:

Consistent – Firstly, make sure you are using consistent settings for all of your photos. Basically, if you’re taking a picture of a street, don’t take one with flash, the second without, and the third in night mode! It’ll all be stitched together, but will look completely different. Stick with one mode and one type of exposure. Manually adjust the white balance and flash settings so they don’t “auto-adjust” themselves.
Centered – When taking the photos, keep all the photos along the same plane. For example, if you’re taking shots from left to right of a scene (x-axis), keep the camera in the same vertical position the entire time (y-axis).
Overlap – When shooting the photos, if you’re going for a horizontal panorama, then move from left to right and make sure that you overlap each adjacent picture by 20 to 30 percent. The photo stitching software needs to be able to have the overlap in order to know what to blend together.

Before we get into the details, here are some cool examples of panoramic pictures you can create from your own digital camera:

Panorama Creation

There are two programs that I have used to create panoramic photos, each with it’s advantages and disadvantages. I will go through both since they are geared towards two different types of users.

Make Panoramas using AutoStitch

AutoStitch is what I started out using and still use quite a bit when I have pictures that I know will easily create a great panorama. AutoStitch is a free program which takes multiple digital photos of a scene and blends them together smoothly to create a panoramic photo automatically for you.

It’s mostly for beginners and creates the panorama for you without any user input. You can set a few options, but for the most part, AutoStitch handles everything.

Once you have it installed on your system, you can go to Edit and Options to set your panorama options.

You don’t have to worry about too many settings here other than Output Size, Image Rotation, and System Memory. You can set the Scale option to 10% – 25% for use on the web. Leave it at 100% if you want to print it. Use Image Rotation to automatically straighten your images if they are not right-side up. Finally, increase the system memory if your photos are large and you are outputting in high quality, otherwise the program will not run well.

Choose File and then Open to select all of the files you want to use for the panorama. The other thing to note in AutoStitch is that it orders photos by the way they are numbered, so you have to manually number them correctly before running the software. Basically, the lowest numbered photo (i.e. “1″) is considered the middle of the panorama, not the left-most picture. So you have to basically number the middle picture 1, then the one to the right of that 2, and then when you loop back to the left side, continue with the higher numbers.

6 7 8 9 1 2 3 4 5

That’s really all you need to do to use AutoStitch! Give it a shot and see how it works out for you. Doesn’t give you a lot of control, but works well if you have a good set of pictures.

Make Panoramas using Hugin and AutoPano Tools

The other piece of free software that allows you to create great panoramic photos is Hugin. Hugin is different from AutoStitch because it’s a bit more complicated, but allows for greater customization and control of your final panorama.

Using Hugin, you can choose the anchor or center image yourself and uses the concept of “control points”. Once you load up your images by clicking on the “Load Images” button, you can then go to the “Control Points” tab. You’ll see colored dots on the images in the program that Hugin uses to align and combine the photos.

You can install AutoPano Tools, which will basically tell Hugin the points where the photos should be merged automatically. However, it sometimes does not do a great job and so you’re better off creating your own control points. You basically will see the photos side by side and then choose the points that overlap with each other in both photos.

Image Source: Lifehacker

You can add as many pairs of points as you like to help Hugin create the best merge possible. You can read the full detailed instructions on how to use Hugin at Lifehacker.

Image Source: Freeware Genius

Overall, both AutoStitch and Hugin are great programs for creating panoramas for free! If you need even more advanced functionality, you’ll have to check out commercial software, but I think for most people this will suffice. Have you tried creating your own panorama using the software above, and if so, how did it work out? Source: LifeHacker

[tags]creating panoramas, make panoramas, panorama creation, panorama software, panorama tools, 360 panorama, panorama stitching[/tags]

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Comments

4 Responses to “How to create panoramas using free software”

puzz said on : April 24th, 2008 at 10:30 am

Good tutorial. I used hugin before, but nu I’m using autostitch for all my panoramas

DWiner said on : April 24th, 2008 at 6:10 pm

I believe this is the same framework on which Microsoft is building their much hyped ‘Photosynth’ (still in labs). 2 photos are mapped with similar points that match and then they are clubbed to bring out a larger, enhanced image. Keep building such images 1 by 1, you can create a 360 degree view, virtually. But creating a 360 view will involve mapping of lakhs of points in an image, which is definitely not a human task. I am not sure whether Google also implements this technology to create Streetviews on their maps.

akishore said on : April 24th, 2008 at 7:39 pm

Puzz, pretty cool panoramas! I am going on a trip soon and hope to make a couple myself!

Dwiner, I have played around with Photosynth and it seems very cool…only if they would release it! It’s been in beta for a long time. Not sure what Google uses, but it works pretty well. I think they have their own technology developed in house.

How to merge pictures to create a panoramic image Says:

[...] In this post I will go through the steps you can follow to create your own panoramic images. If you don’t want to do it yourself, read my previous post on using free software to create panoramas. [...]
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