I am trying to put five images together into a panorama using Autostitch.

It seems to work really good except it is leaving about one entire image off. There doesn't seem to be much for options but does anyone know something I can change ?

Here is the image I am getting. LINK

There should be more water on the left side of the image.

Here are the images I am trying to combine.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/mqnT64mHMPSa4w5fpQo6vQ?feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/i_BZAb0GuH1WQdK61BPKIQ?feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/W3XgBARlOvRONOB9vwjRbA?feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/wfHYTphJkHh50_xOqkJGzg?feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/v6orcHGzOZmotRMIeTD1Tg?feat=directlink

I have Autostitch, but I don't use it. I use Microsoft's free ICE program, I have been very impressed with the results.

tanstaafl.

I use Autostitch for most image joining things, however it has some foibles - if the images are too dissimilar you need to relax the settings, quite easy to tweak, really

Can you recommend what settings to change ?

Will get a quick play with those images this eve and report back :-)

Thanks

I messed around for a while and was able to get the entire photo on the left side to show up but then the one on the right was getting cut off. I seems like a size thing but I did try changing the output size settings.

Try this. I think you'll do like I did and give up on Autostitch.

Attached is an example, stitched from 36 images. ICE is able to save jpg images that are too large for most software to open. The original full-res version of this picture runs nearly 30 MB, and irfanview is the only program I have that will open it. The attached image is scaled way down, to about 3.6% of the original image size.

tanstaafl.

Hmmm - even when looking at the sift and ransac functions, values even at both ends of the range fail. Having a look at the pictures, there is very little in there for the program to work on - I was hoping the curly cloud would be enough, as the water is different, and the green surface seems to have changed by a fair amount.

I even tweaked things around in photoshop to see if I could force a match but no joy.

Sorry

Rory

Hey thanks for trying !

You are right it probably is a pretty hard one to do. I have little experience with making these I was expecting to be able to just kind of manually drag the pictures around and line them up so I didn't think it would matter what was in them. Next time I will plan more.

Here is what I got out of the Microsoft program. (pretty much the same thing as tanstaafl got) http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/SQKUTdUZkbak5Q0nuCsq7A?feat=directlink

It did put all the pictures in there but there is a seam showing and I don't see any options in that program at all.

I will have to try doing one with multiple rows of photos I didn't even know I could do that.

You said "Tweaked", without explanation.

You might edit in some artifacts for the software to focus on. Maybe a couple of spots where the pixels have been inverted or had the brightness changed by a fixed amount, to be reverted after stitching.

You are right, there is a seam showing between the first and second (left-to-right) pictures. 20 seconds with the clone tool in Paint.net made it go away. You have a lot of overlap with those two shots, so the seam is surprising. I'm guessing that there just isn't enough detail (as gbeer suggested) to make a foolproof join.

What I like about the Microsoft ICE program is that there aren't many options in the program. It just works. I have never had it fail if I had at least a 15% overlap on the pictures, and it does things like automatically adjust exposure between the individual pictures as it stitches them. In the sample I posted, I set the camera to manual focus and exposure (all shots were f-8 at 1/500 second, 90 mm focal length at 35mm equiv.) and the 270 degree sweep included everything from shooting directly towards the sun to shooting directly away from it. Using the camera's automatic exposure would have varied the exposure by three f-stops from one end to the other. At this point I'm not sure whether I would have been better to let the camera set the exposure, or let the ICE program make the adjustments. In any case, the results speak for themselves.

I found the Autostitch options to be confusing and non-intuitive, and am happy to concede that the Microsoft program's default parameters work better than I could manage to do myself. I figure as long as the pictures stitch together seamlessly and look just like any one of the original pictures, well... "Options? We don' need no steenkin' options!"

Just for the fun of it, I am attaching two tiny excerpts (.04% of the full stitched image), one of them at the low resolution of the panorama attached earlier in this thread, and the other at the high resolution of the original panorama. Someday I may go completely crazy and set the focal length to 360mm and re-shoot the panorama at ultra-high resolution, which will require, ummm, let's see. 90mm focal length required 36 exposures, 180mm would require 4 times as much, and 360mm would require 4x that, so it would be 576 exposures, about 2 GB factoring in the overlap. According to Microsoft, there is no practical limit to the number of exposures ICE will stitch, the problem being that there are not many (if any?) programs that can open a 2GB graphics file.

tanstaafl.

And just to take things to extreme, this is the most detail I can get, zoomed to 420mm, 4x digital zoom. It would require more than 10,000 exposures to shoot the entire panorama at this level, ~40 TB. I don't think even irfanview would open that one.

That church steeple is .54 kilometers (.34 miles) away, according to Google Earth.

tanstaafl.

This is where it would be nice to have one of those motorized pano tripod heads. If image exposure is predictable stitching should be able to be done without the software guessing what to stich where. Or you could just use an 8x10 view camera and get a 100+ megapixel image with one shot. Different ways of doing the same thing.

That thing's crazy. Just use an egg timer.

Then you don't get precision movements so yo have to go back to manually stitching things together or letting a program doing it for you (and possibly messing it up). But is it impractical for the average user? Yes of course.