I have always enjoyed creating a panoramic image from a set of digital photographs because it makes me feel like a professional photographer! In this article, I will be talking specifically about desktop software and online tools, since almost every smartphone has a panorama function built into the camera software. Using free PC software and taking photos with care, you can create pretty fantastic looking wide-angle or 360-degree panoramas.
Best of all, you don’t really need to know much about photography in order to create panoramic images; you just need to remember a few simple rules when taking photos. Before you start creating your own panorama, first read the following tips:
- Consistent. First, make sure you use consistent settings for all of your photos. Usually, if you are photographing the street, do not shoot one with the flash, the second without, and the third in night mode! Everything will be glued together, but it will look completely different. Stick to one mode and one type of exposure. Manually adjust the white balance and flash settings so they don’t “auto adjust” themselves.
- Center – When taking photos, keep all photos in the same plane. For example, if you are taking pictures of a scene from left to right (x-axis), keep the camera in the same vertical position all the time (y-axis).
- Overlay – when taking photos, if you are going to take a horizontal panorama, move from left to right and make sure you overlap each the adjacent image by 20 to 30 percent. Photo stitching software needs to be able to overlap in order to know what to merge together.
- Orientation – When viewing thumbnails of your images in Explorer, make sure they are all facing up to the right.
Before we dive into the details, here are some interesting examples of panoramic images you can create with your own digital camera:
There are several different programs I have used to create panoramic photos, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
AutoStitch
AutoStitch is what I started using and still use it quite often when I have images that I know make a great panorama easily. AutoStitch is a free program that takes multiple digital photos of a scene and seamlessly merges them together to automatically create a panoramic shot.
This is mostly for beginners and creates a panorama for you without any user intervention. You can set several parameters, but for the most part AutoStitch handles everything.
After you install it on your system and run it, you will see three large icons, of which you can only click on two. The folder icon is for selecting a folder with panoramic images, and the gear icon is for settings.
You can press the settings button first to make sure the defaults are in order. You can customize the output size, blending options, interface options, and advanced options. For starters, I wouldn’t mess with any of these settings if you don’t need them either.
Click on the folder icon and select all photos for your panorama. When you press the OK button, the program will automatically start processing images and creating a panorama. You have nothing else to do with this program.
After a few seconds, your panorama will be created and should open in your default image viewer. Below I took five pictures of a room in my house and they fit together perfectly.
AutoStitch is very easy to use and works best for photos that are well planned and follow all the guidelines mentioned above. There are no manipulation or editing options, so if you want something that gives you more control check out the programs below.
Hugen
Another free program that lets you create stunning panoramic photos is Hugin Hugin is different from AutoStitch because it is a little more complex, but allows for better customization and control of your final panorama. In fact, they have three modes depending on your level: Easy, Advanced and Expert. You can switch between them by clicking the menu item “Interface”.
Keep it simple for a start, and when you learn how to use the program, you can switch to other modes. First, click the “Upload Images” button.
Depending on which camera you used to shoot, you may get a message that the program could not find any field of view information for the image.
I took a couple of pictures with my iPhone and this information doesn’t appear to be included in the image metadata. Just google your iPhone model and HFOV and you should be able to find it. This is usually somewhere between 52 and 56. Enter this and it will automatically fill in the focal length. Hopefully, most people won’t see this dialogue at all.
You should now see all uploaded images and a preview of the panorama. Don’t worry if something goes wrong, because the next step is alignment. Go ahead and click the Align button and the program will launch some image tools to align them correctly. Basically, these are breakpoints that are created automatically and tell the program which parts of two different images match.
Finally, click Create Panorama and select your output options. Click OK and a couple of windows will appear to start processing the image. In addition, the program will create a bunch of temporary files in the same directory as the final panorama, so just be patient and wait for it to complete as the temporary files will be deleted automatically.
This is how you can use Hugin in its simplest form. If you need more control, just click on the different tabs (Layout, Projection, Move / Drag, Crop) and you can fine-tune almost every aspect of the panorama. If you want to create professional panoramas, then Hugin is the best option.
The final results of my test were very good. Adjusted exposure applied to photographs improved the overall look of the scene compared to AutoStitch However, there were more minor inconsistencies in Hugin‘s output that AutoStitch did not.
Microsoft composite photo editor
Another great free tool that’s a few years old but works great is the Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). What’s really cool about this program is that you can create panoramas from videos. If you were filming a mountain slope by rotating the camcorder from left to right, then you can use ICE to create a panorama from frames extracted from the video. All this is done for you, so you don’t have to do anything complicated.
However, in this post I will only talk about stitching pictures. The process is very simple. Once installed and launched, you can simply drag and drop your photos into the interface, or click File and then New Panorama. Select the images and they are immediately loaded and stitched in the preview window.
You can change the camera movement, crop image, change export settings, and panorama size. The program supports unlimited photos, so you can create gigapixel panoramas using ICE. It is also convenient that you can export to other formats like BMP, TIFF, PNG, PSD, etc. Click “Export to Disk†to save the file.
My test results were very good and better than both of the programs mentioned above. There were fewer artifacts, and the final image color was also better. Of course, you have to work with a very good set of images to get good results with ICE.
There are many other panorama apps available, many of which are paid, but you never have to spend money to create panoramas. The programs mentioned above can create gorgeous professional-quality panoramas with difficult-to-fit images. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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