I've just stumbled across Microsoft's Image Composite editor for stitching photos together for panoramics. I've never done a stitched panoramic and would like to do so. has anyone used the program and if so is it any good?
Worth a try since it's free, although I've never heard of anyone using it, which probably isn't a good sign.
Many people use Photoshop, all recent versions including Elements include panorama stitching. I'm not a big fan of it personally, it doesn't give enough control, so it tends to either work or not, and if it works and you don't like the result, you can't tweak anything.
For more advanced stitching (or if you don't have Photoshop), Hugin is highly rated, and it what I now exclusively use for all my panoramas. It's free and insanely powerful (you can tweak every single parameter of how it does the stitching), but also has a completely automatic mode where you load the images, hit the align button, and hit the create button, and after a few minutes you get the finished product out.
There's also lots of tutorials on the Hugin site if you want to learn how to do more advanced stitching with it.
Here are a few panoramas I've created with Hugin, the first being a complex two dimensional one (where instead of just a strip of photos, you build up photos in a grid pattern). For all of these you would get extremely acceptable results using the automatic settings, although for most of them I did some manual tweaks.
I've tried ICE. It's totally automatic and you don't have any manual adjustments at all.
I use Panorama Maker by Arcsoft. I like it. It has an automatic mode, but also has some manual control too. It's not free, but it's very affordable.
I made this one using Panorama Maker.
It's 2 horizontal panoramas of 5 images each then stacked one above the other to make a 2 image vertical panorama. The banding in the sky was because I forgot to remove my polarizing filter.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
Many people use Photoshop, all recent versions including Elements include panorama stitching. I'm not a big fan of it personally, it doesn't give enough control, so it tends to either work or not, and if it works and you don't like the result, you can't tweak anything.
For more advanced stitching (or if you don't have Photoshop), Hugin is highly rated, and it what I now exclusively use for all my panoramas. It's free and insanely powerful (you can tweak every single parameter of how it does the stitching), but also has a completely automatic mode where you load the images, hit the align button, and hit the create button, and after a few minutes you get the finished product out.
It's available here: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
There's also lots of tutorials on the Hugin site if you want to learn how to do more advanced stitching with it.
Here are a few panoramas I've created with Hugin, the first being a complex two dimensional one (where instead of just a strip of photos, you build up photos in a grid pattern). For all of these you would get extremely acceptable results using the automatic settings, although for most of them I did some manual tweaks.
I use Panorama Maker by Arcsoft. I like it. It has an automatic mode, but also has some manual control too. It's not free, but it's very affordable.
I made this one using Panorama Maker.
It's 2 horizontal panoramas of 5 images each then stacked one above the other to make a 2 image vertical panorama. The banding in the sky was because I forgot to remove my polarizing filter.