365 Discoveries

I’ll being filing this one under “Shared Discoveries” because I didn’t find this program all on my own; A friend of mine introduced it to me a couple of years ago on a trip down Highway 1. For some reason he wanted to take a panoramic photo so I tried setting my cheap digital camera to pano-mode. It’s supposed to make pano shots easier by allowing you to take a photo and then show part of that photo on the LCD screen so you can line up the next shot. However, as everyone knows, manual panoramic shots either with a built-in camera function or later trying to line up those shots in a photo editor are just awful.

So my friend starts taking random shots of this eroding hillside along the highway. There was no rhyme or reason, just snapping shots of the hillside. Then, he ensures me that this program he’s telling me about will be able to take all those photos and make a perfect panoramic photo out of it. I was skeptical, but sure enough, it did!

The program? From the project home page: “AutoStitch is the product of two years of research by Matthew Brown and David Lowe at the University of British Columbia.” And from Wikipedia, “The software uses the SIFT- and the RANSAC-Algorithm. This program differs from others such as photostitch in that it automatically stitches together even unaligned or zoomed photographs seamlessly without user input, whereas others often require the user to highlight matching areas for the photographs to merge properly. The only requirement is that all photographs be taken from a single point.”

In other words, AutoStitch is a free program (or “free-to-try” for non-commerical purposes) that takes a selection of separate photographs and “stitches” them together to make one large photograph. The resulting photograph doesn’t necessarily have to be a traditional panoramic photo. AutoStitch will make sense out of photos taken in any order, location, or size of particular scene. AutoStitch will also perform needed contrast, brightness, color and level image adjustments in order to create the seamless image.

Here I offer a couple of examples of AutoStitch’s work on photos taken by me on a recent trip to Yosemite National Park.

Below are the 10 source images (thumbnails, click for full size):

Which produced (click for full size):

As you can see, it does the best with what it has. My photos weren’t exactly straight or proportional. Also, AutoStitch will perform skewing and perspective transformations to make the image appear continuous and flat instead of the weird angled look that one can get by doing panoramic by hand. The black edges are easily remedied by cropping.

Cropped:

And now we have a beautiful panoramic photo of Yosemite Falls and Half Dome taken from the valley floor.

Again:

And cropped:

When taking shots in the field and you have plans to use AutoStitch later, be sure to take lots of photos of your subject, making sure to leave no part out. Take photos of the area around the subject as well in case  cropping in post production might force you to crop out some of the photo like in the example above. Also remember the photos have to be from the same point and not at an extreme angle.

AutoStitch is a awesome program, but it’s no miracle. Below is a failed stitch:

In all fairness, the above failure is partially user error. The photo above consists of only two photographs; one taken at a fairly straight angle and the other and an extreme angle. Presumably, AutoStitch didn’t have enough data to properly align the photograph. One could argue, however, that with enough Photoshop work, the photo could become properly aligned, though, at the cost of quality.

There are other programs that use the AutoStitch source. Presumably, the creators sold their technology for a good price. Unfortunately these knock off programs seem to add little or no functionality on top of the original AutoStitch software, yet they charge between $50 and €99 (EUR) for another (approx. $150 USD).

Be sure to visit the Panorama Gallery to see more results of the program.

See Flickr photos tagged with “autostitch” (The best way to see good results!)