Free software for panoramic photos

[Haventgotone]

Hi all,

Hope this is allowed - if not mods please delete.

I came across this free download and was so impressed - thought perhaps some of you expert photographers might like to give it a try.

 

Autostitch™ is the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical).

Autostitch is built using cutting edge research from the AI lab at UBC, but it's incredibly simple to use! Just select a set of photos, and Autostitch does the rest: digital photos in, panoramas out. Try the free demo (for Windows):

Download the FREE demo version now!
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

[Cassis]

This is pretty neat - thank you for that.  It took precisely 30secs to stitch and crop this from 5 old photos using that software.

Apologies for the width, but there you go!

[img]http://www.normandie-chambres.co.uk/pics/pano.jpg[/img]

I had done it before using standard  photo editing software, but it took ages.  Here was the result when I did it manually. 

It's smaller because I resized it for our website.  There's also at least one extra image on the left (the original has been lost so I

couldn't include it in the autostitch version).

[img]http://www.normandie-chambres.co.uk/pics/full_panorama.jpg[/img]

[Haventgotone]

You're welcome Cassis - love your fantastic picture.

[Steve Last]

If you are interested in making panoramas for your web site you might want to take a look at Pixtra Panostitcher.  www.pixtra.com .

I have tried literally dozens of panorama packages and have found nearly all the cheap/free ones are too limited, slow or otherwise a waste of time if you need them for any kind of commercial use, while the expensive ones are way too heavyweight if you are not doing it full time. Panosticher has some slightly weird interface issues (e.g. no UNDO facility) but it is very fast and does an excellent job of stitching, blending and correcting geometry errors without requiring significant input. 

However for me the big plus is that you can use it to make interactive panoramas, so that instead of having to show the panorama as a wide banner you can have a normal size window and the image moves around within it. This can be put straight onto your website and edited as an ordinary page. You can see examples on my website, e.g. at  http://www.ownergroups.com/Miraflores/pictures.htm . It takes a few seconds to load the little viewer application and then each image, but it is then very effective (in my opinion!).  It is not free software but pretty cheap ($30 US = £15). The demo is free and works 100% (it just leaves a "watermark" on the panoramas).  They also do a "3D" version (Omnistitcher) which gives a vertical as well as horizontal image.  For anyone who needs that kind of "virtual tour" but doesn't want to spend lots of time and money on it I think it is a pretty good deal.

cheers

Steve