I’ve been playing around with panorama software for a long time. It’s a nice way to spend the hours playing with pictures taken earlier. The basic idea is to take a series of pictures and stitch them together to make a larger pictures with a higher resolution of each single picture.

I’ve been using PTAssembler for this work – it’s a bit hard, but the results are usually worth it. You can control everything and the results are often stunning.

Now sometimes a tool comes around that’s so easy to use, that you become suspecious about it. AutoStitch from UBC is one of those tools. You select your source images with a normal file open dialog. Wait. And you have a stitched image in the directory you selected the files from. You can tweak the settings, like target size and jpeg quality, but you don’t have to.

The worst part is that the results seems to be better than what I could do with PTAssembler and hours and hours of tweaking. God, I hate that!

Here’s an image stitched with AutoStitch:

http://gallery.tc.dk/stitched2/pano_trains_autostitch

And here’s the old PTAssembler version I made a long ago:

http://gallery.tc.dk/stitched/panorama1crop_copy

I’ll add more examples later.

Yes, there’s differences. Mainly that the new AutoStitch version is small, but that’s by my choice, as I set an option to scale it to 50%. There are error’s in the AutoStitch version, (notice the wires crossing the leftmost track), but they are also there in the PTAssembler version, actually they are worse in the PTAssembler version, and are probably a limitation imposed by the source images (I hadn’t rotated the camera along the right axel).