At request from Korny, the details of what I used to stitch the panoramas:
- I used autopano-sift
to build the initial pto file. It seems to want the pictures to be rotated correctly, but apart from that it hasn’t failed me yet. This requires C#, which means installing mono. This is somewhat large and heavy, even if you happen to have a nice clean installer for it. Command line:
autopano-complete.sh -o hugin.pto DSCF00*
(Where DSCF00 is the common prefix of all my images)
- I used hugin to fine-tune and preview the Panorama. It is a very cool tool if used patiently: It offers sensible tips which lead to me getting the result I wanted in the end. Unfortunately, at the time, there wasn’t an Ubuntu package for it, so I had to satisfy its myriad dependencies and build it myself. This was painful.
- Rather than using the built-in hugin stitching engine nona for the stitching, I used the panotools PTStitcher to do the final join-up, because it supports colour and exposure correction. I’m sure the clean way to do things would have been to fix the exposure while taking the shots, but this is fiendishly difficult to do with my digicam.
The resuts so far have been about 75% satisfactory:
New Zealand 1:
New Zealand 2:
Buckland Valley:
I have had mixed success with the colour-correction aspect of PTStitcher. It keeps giving me images with a greenish tinge at the edges, or lush rainforests which look like they could burst into flame at any moment.I need to do a bit more work with this… there may be a fix to be achieved by using the right kind of anchor points.
There is a huge amount of potential in this stuff. Witness, for example, The Giga-Pixel Image. And for the benefit of Dave, yes, this can all be done under Windows with the same tools, although as Damien points out, there are plenty of alternatives.