Panoramic Pictures
Looking to create some high quality high resolution panoramic images? There are many methods and software packages available to do this. Some better than others!
Around 12 months ago we started looking at the available options. We wanted a way of producing consistently high quality pictures from multiple images stitched together with a seamless transition between the images. The expectation was that we wanted to do this on a shoe-string budget! A lot of different products were evaluated before we decided on the best one for the job.
For the impatient we have a couple of images to show you on one of our other websites. Just click on the below image to be taken to the panoramic album at NZ Digital Images - this particular image is 27 Mega Pixels or 9000 x 3000 pixels and made by stitching together 4 images. There are only a couple of pictures on display at the moment but we will be adding some more shortly.
Hugin ended up being our software package of choice, it is essentially a cross-platform front-end GUI for Panorama Tools. The Hugin installer contains everything you need to get started.
Taking all our photos as RAW files we where after a software package that allowed us to work with our images without introducing noise, other artifacts or image degradation. This meant that we needed to be able to work with TIFF files!
Shooting with and Olympus E-300 and doing our image conversion with Rawshooter Professional (which is no longer available). We were able apply our initial fixes, scale the image and convert to TIFF. Once converted we then add the selected images to Hugin and went through the stitching and blending process. Our final editing is done with the Gimp.
We don't want to get into the details here of how to use Hugin. There is a great resource for Panorama Tools (which applies to hugin) available at the Panorama Tools Wiki. Here you will find lots of documentation and tutorials for creating great panoramas.