Best Free Digital Image Stitcher

Hugin is for professionals. It has a learning curve, but once you get how it works, it's the most complete and powerful option out there. It'as also fast and its quality is unsurpassed. You can even blend HDRI's (high dynamic range images) with it, and have a myriad of projection options.

I just posted the comment about Panostich here earlier.

I searched and here is an working Microsoft ICE URL:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

I am disappopinted that I cannot use ICE because my OS is Windows 2000 Pro... but hope the M/S ICE URL works for ya!

Good luck!

DJMK

I have been seeking a good simple panorama stitch ap for a while now. I tried the Microsoft ICE link on this article but could not bring the page up. Perhaps the link is bad? Let me know if the link or my computer is the problem.

I have a Canon camera and have been using Canon Photostitch. On wayyy too many pix it did a lousy job joining and blending; the stitch seam was obvious and straight lines often looked like bent or fractured bones.

Anywayyy...I just did a Google search for a decent freeware/shareware photo stitcher with good enough quality to use for my real estate marketing media needs. In my search I luckily happened upon the Pixtra site. Blind luck led me to it and blind luck led me to choose to download Pixtra PanoStitcher 1.6.

WOWWW is all I can say! This one WORKS! And using the blend button has created perfect blends from formerly unusable picture pairs I tried to join with Canon PhotoStitch. And the create perspective option turns the curvilinear perspective to perfect straight perspective photos. And it also blends uneven lighting very well.

I would urge folks here to try it as I had tried several others before and decided to give my search for a usable program one last try.

The shareware version is not in any way disabled that I can see but you are limited to joing just two shots without watermarks being placed on the result. But this is fine for my needs for the most part. Rarely do I need to join three or more shots. The vast majority of my pix are simple two photo joins to get a wide angle shot in close quarters. It does a great job on multi-shot joins and has lots of extras and editing options.

I will keep on using it and if it continues to work as well as it has for me today, I WILL buy it! I will be intersted to read what others here think about it.

Here is the URL to the Pixtra site: http://www.pixtra.com/Downloads/Download.htm

Good luck!

DJMK

The best and easiest to use "free" panoramic image stitcher is Canon Photostitch, available on the CD that comes with Canon digital cameras. Beware though, everything else on the CD sucks, but fortunately the setup program allows you to pick which programs to install.

Richard

I needed to join 20+ images from a large map that I scanned in. I used Autostich, Hugin, and Microsoft ICE. ICE was the best out of the three. Autostich transition between all of the images was ok, but you could clearly see the over lap. To be fair to Hugin, I only spent about 30 minutes trying to figure it out, and it seems like a very powerful program, but I could only match the quality of Autostich. Microsoft ICE stiched the images almost perfectly, and you can't tell where the transition is. Although, ICE has more limited options, it worked the best.

I vote for hugin !

For what it's worth, I just generated a a couple of panoramas from the same images (made by rotating the camera in a slightly haphazard fashion :-) using ICE and Autostich by way of comparison.
The results from Autostich were far superior (ie. much more natural looking) in both cases.

"... but a little-publicised feature is available in the Make menu: "Panorama Stitcher"."

It's not little-publicized any more, if you've been watching any network TV at all in recent months.

Also, is this critter ad-supported, or what? What's Microsoft's expected revenue stream from this? They wouldn't be paying the big bucks for prime-time national advertising (for several apps in the Live suite) unless they had solid expectations of making some money from it. Clearly "free" isn't really very free with Windows Live Photo Gallery, so what's the catch? I started skimming the "service agreement" for it, and it's got more than one paragraph dealing with charges and fees... though NOTHING SPECIFIC, of course.

Call me paranoid, but I don't trust what Microsoft is up to with this whole "Live" program, and I won't use it. Frankly, I suspect they hope to get people hooked, at which point they'll change the service agreement and start CHARGING A SUBSCRIPTION for them. That's the Holy Grail: being able to charge people every month for software instead of just once for a license.

I am using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
I have had no problems with it though it can be slow.
It handles hand held shots well, i did a 12 photo 360 deg. pan and a 180 deg over the top of my head.
It colour matches very well.
Photoshop CS3 is good if you have it - I don't.
However it successfully joined two photos that were taken at 28 and 40mm (effective focal lengths.
Bockey.

Ok, for those who could not load this up onto their computers I suggest you try again. They have another update that they loaded on the 17th Oct. Worth downloading again even if you have it on your computer for the update

Tony

Just a note if you are trying to download ICE that people are getting difficulties in accessing the Microsoft site. If this is the case then go to this location and downloaded if from here
http://www.photo-freeware.net/microsoft-image-composite-editor.php

Tony

Microsoft Labs also offers a 3D stitcher: http://photosynth.net/

As of October 7th and 8th, I am NOT ABLE to download this Beta program from the links posted to Microsoft's Research Center.

WOT addon for Firefox tells me that Panorama Perfect lite site is a dangerous one for reliability and privacy. That may or may not be the case but use precaution. Based on comments on Firefox web site, reliability problems may be due to fact WOT does not like some sites which are actually ok.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=wot

What the heck is MS doing in the visual design area ?!? If they are creating a market beyond Adobe they have my support...

Gosh, it looked so promising!

I installed ICE and proceeded to test it right away with four 10mpx uncompressed TIFs. I know that's a bit demanding but modern stitching programs should handle it with no problems.

Well, after loading the pics it read 'solving...' and was like that for so long I thought my PC had hanged, until I clicked on cancel and the process was stopped. I tried again and had the same result. I thought it could be because of the number of photos or their size, so I tried just two 3mpx JPGs. The same thing again. At my fourth attempt I happened to click on the cube in the toolbar while the operation was still displaying the 'solving' message and... at last! The thing isn't obvious at all, if that's the way it's intended to work. Probably it isn't.

Then I was able to go through the functions and I really understand why you're so enthusiastic about it, Tony. Really nice capabilities, though I miss a color matching option. However, that's not much to complain about in a free program.

But... something went wrong. I clicked on the 'exit' button and the program closed after prompting to save the project. A minute later I tried to open it again and the typical 'ICE has found a problem and must be closed...' appeared on screen. And that was so for as many times as I tried. I thought I'd better reinstall it and went to the program folder just to find there's no uninstaller.

I'll try overwriting the old folder, but that'll be tomorrow. We'll see.

These issues might be specific to my setup, but they shouldn't be there. Yes, I know it's a beta, but I don't know whether to think Microsoft are again neglecting basic aspects or they are unaware of them. Anyway, I think it's best if I report the bugs. Hopefully they'll fix them.

Marc

I vote for Hugin, too.

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.