Best Free Digital Image Stitcher
What is a stitch program? Quite simply, if you have taken a series of photographs of a scene that you would like to piece together as one picture, then this is what you're looking for. I have used two programs for quite a while.
The first is Autostitch, a program written by Matthew Brown, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia.
It comes complete with some sample pictures for you to play with. Select File/Open and choose your pictures, and then just sit back and wait while it formats the photos into a single combined panorama. All lighting corrections and blending are done for you. The downside of this program is some arcing in the panorama that leaves black edges. You will need to crop the panorama to get clean edges.
The second is Panorama Perfect Lite. It's the freeware version of a commercial product, but the only difference I can see is a limitation on the size of the panorama picture it can produce. However, this should not be a constraint for most users.
The strength of this software is its ability to match up photos taken without a tripod. Using nodes on the blending area of each photo, you can match each structure (tree, building etc.) to ensure that there is no distortion when joining. Although more complex, this process allows a better stitch without the bending and distortion you sometimes get with Autostitch. This difference will not be important to casual photographers, but more serious users will consider the effort worthwhile.
A third option is Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is an allrounder for managing your photos (much the same as Picasa), but a little-publicised feature is available in the Make menu: "Panorama Stitcher". It is a no-brainer - simply select the photos from the thumbnails viewer, and the program does the rest. Cropping and adjustment is immediately at hand under the Fix menu. The program works much like Autostitch. The blending results, incidentally, are superior as compared to purchased programms such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. Highly recommended all around.
Autostitch
Website: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
Author: Matthew Brown
License: Free time limited demonstration version. License can be renewed by re-downloading.
Download Size: 1053kb
Operating systems supported: 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista
Panorama Perfect Lite
Website: http://www.volny.cz/panopohanka/index.htm
Author: Michal Pohanka
License: Freeware
Download size: 1.93MB
Operating systems supported: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Website: http://get.live.com/photogallery/features
Author: Microsoft
License: Freeware
Download Size: 2.28MB
Operating systems supported: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
This software category is maintained by volunteer editor Tony Bennett.
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Hugin, is a good Open scource stitch program. It is however a very difficult program for most to get to grips with. It does have a few WYSIWYG aspects to it, but much of the information it requires needs a lot of knowledge more than the average user would possibly know. I do use it on odd occasions. But, then I sometimes get my lens info all up the creek.
Tony
I have recently discovered Hugin, a very nice piece of work, fully automatic, and also all the techinical stuff transparent to you if you like playing with the numbers.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
For a different kind of stitching, you might want to include Microsoft's GroupShot. This allows you to stitch together the best portrait from a series of similar portrait shots.
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