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Technical Information

What is Stitching?

Stitching is a commonly used technique where you use panoramic software to join several images together - to gain more detail than is possible from one shot, or to gain a wider view than is easily possible with one shot.



fig. 1) Four wide-angle shots.



fig. 2) The same shots, bunched up so that they overlap. It is easy to see that they do not join up, especially where there are continuous lines.



fig. 3) After passing the images through the stitching software, the images are remapped to a cylindrical perspective that can cope with such a wide angle view (nearly 180 degrees). The images have also been aligned so that all the features join up.



fig 4.) The final images blended together. All that is left to do is to crop to a rectangular image and do any overall colour and tonal corrections.



fig 5.) Most of the images are rather more complex than the four-shot example, as can be seen above in the source images for the panorama of St. James Park, Newcastle, made up from ninety five images.




Equipment Used - back to top

Camera: Canon 10D 6MP digital SLR
Lenses: Sigma 12-24mm f4, Canon 70-200mm f4L
Camera support: Manfrotto tripod, home-made panoramic head
Laptop: Apple 1GHz G4 PowerBook
Main computer: 2x2GHz G5 Apple PowerMac




Software Used - back to top

Stitching software: PTMac
See also Hugin (open-source for Mac, Windows, Linux), PTGui (Windows), PTAssembler (Windows) and Realviz Stitcher (Mac and Windows).
Image processing: Adobe Photoshop CS




Further Reading - back to top

There are many sites on the web devoted to panoramic photography, here is a selection of the best:

www.panoramas.dk - the best QuickTime-based interactive panoramas on the net, collected together in one place, with new panoramas every week.

The PanoTools WIKI -
a user-maintained knowledge base of panoramic tips, tricks and tutorials.

VRMag - the main online magazine for interactive panoramas.

Panoramic Blog - Andras Frenyo's panoblog.

360 days | a vr-log - a panoramic blog by Belgian photographer Mickael Therer.