Stitched-Mosaic Photography

For some really inspiring super-resolution photos check out
http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/

or "the 2.5 gigapixel photo" at
http://www.tpd.tno.nl/smartsite966.html

or "The Gigapxl Project" at
http://www.gigapxl.org/

or, for a photojournalist's "Adventures with Panoramas" see
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/pano-adventures.shtml

My own more modest examples are at:
http://www.pbase.com/pjcooney/stitched

Good tutorials on making stitched mosaic photos include
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.houghton/pttute.htm
and
http://www.stmuc.com/digicam/

PTGui is a graphical front end for Prof. Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools. I use it to make stitched mosaics. You can find PTGui at
http://www.ptgui.com/

PTAssembler is an alternate GUI front end for PanoTools, available at
http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm

Dersch's Panorama Tools is a suite of very powerful but tricky-to-use software available free from either the PTGui site
http://www.ptgui.com/
or the PTAssembler site
http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm
or at
http://home.no.net/dmaurer/~dersch/Index.htm
or at
http://www.all-in-one.ee/~dersch/

For an interesting free (and very easy to use) alternative stitching program, checkout
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

For still more on photo stitching visit:
http://www.panoguide.com/

A wealth of links to tutorials and more is at:
http://www.swissarmyfork.com/panorama_links.html

When making photos to stitch together, remember:

lock your ISO,
lock your white balance,
lock your exposure,
lock your zoom and focus,
favor taking more frames at longer focal lengths rather than fewer at the wide end of your zoom range, then
between shots pivot your camera around the center of the LENS as best you can,
allow at least one-quarter frame overlap between adjacent images,
and have fun!

Perhaps the least obvious of these is favoring longer focal lengths. Smaller solid-angle images have less vignetting, require smaller corrections for lens distortion, give your software more points to determine the projective geometry, and produce a more detail-rich final image. The downside is of course more stitching and a longer total time for clouds to move and lighting to change while you're taking the original photos.

--Pat Cooney
--last updated 2006-02-18