Easy High Quality Panoramic Montages Using Autostitch · by Simon Mackie
Stitching the Images with Autostitch
You get presented with a screen like this one when it starts up:
Although it says “Select File::Open to begin”, don’t do that, we’re going to change a couple of settings first. Click on Edit->Options.
What we’re going to do is, under Output Size, click the Width button and change the width of the generated image to be much wider. In this case I’ve picked 8000 pixels. If your computer is not very powerful and doesn’t have a lot of memory, setting this to 8000 pixels wide will take Autostitch a long time to process the images, so be warned – you might like to try a test run at a much smaller width first. Next, as I rotated the camera while taking the images, select Clockwise under Image Rotation. Click OK and we should be all set.
The next thing you need to do is tell Autostitch which images you want to use, so click on File->Open and hold down the Ctrl button while clicking on the images that will make up the panorama, like this:
Once you’ve selected them all, click Open and Autostitch will start running automatically. Depending on the width you selected, how powerful your PC is and th amount of memory it has, this process could take quite a long time, so go and make a cup of coffee.
Once it’s finished, Autostitch will save the output image (called “pano.jpg”) in the same folder as the source images. Open it up in your image editor, and hopefully you should have something like this:
It’s uneven because I didn’t use a tripod, so I’ll crop it to make it look tidier, adjust the levels, and apply a little unsharp mask:
And I’m done, a great 8000 pixel wide, high quality panorama with very little effort. With a little experimentation, you can use Autostitch to produce some crazily impressive pictures – check out the Flickr Autostitch group for some inspiration.
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