This and That: Panorama and Stitching
       By Elizabeth B. Wright  November 2006

Last month I spent a lot of money, at least for me it was a lot. A sale item seemed like a good deal, so I plunked down the old plastic and happily carried home my new toy. Last week one of the stores carried an ad for more product (same brand) for less money. But figuring I had overspent before, it didn’t take much willpower to ignore the siren call. The original purchase works fine (it’s a USB external hard drive), so I would have really liked to own the larger, cheaper one. Maybe someday it will be advertised again. In the meantime I am rapidly filling up the first one. If there is a moral to this tale I’m not sure what it is.

There is a British company named Serif which markets some great software. I use several of their programs as alternatives to the more irritating products from the higher priced producers. They are online at www.serif.com . One of the latest I have enjoyed using is the panorama or stitching software which works in a superior fashion to any other I have ever used. The name of the program is PanoramaPlus. Here is an example of it’s power:

The three small images were stitched together in the program and the result was the tall picture at the left. It would work well printed out in panorama form rather than a standard 4 by 6 or smaller print.
 

While nothing is perfect, with a little patience a picture that approximates what you can see with your eyes is possible as opposed to the limitations your camera places on an image.

There are many programs available which perform this function, but having tried several in the past this seems to me to be better than the others. Not all pictures will work smoothly, but I have used it for various images, large buildings and scenic panoramas, and I am satisfied with the results. It certainly beats pasting printed pictures together at odd angles to achieve the same effect. Although you end up with some black spaces surrounding the finished product, my preference is to leave them rather than crop them out. Too much of the picture can be lost by cropping and I can live with the black spaces. In some cases you can use the clone tool in your imaging program to add some of the surrounding picture to the spaces, but this is a lot of work and isn’t always satisfactory. If the picture is for an important project it might be worth the time and effort to clean it up. But I have seen some pretty sloppy pictures in professional presentations, so use your own judgment about how much time to spend on any given project.

Elizabeth Wright is a member of the CCOKC and secretary to the Board. She is a regular writer for the eMonitor