Taking many photographs and stitching them together into one large panoramic shot is easy - if you have the right tools.  When I was on Easter Island this summer running a marathon for Team Diabetes , I took many wide shots of the Moai statues on the side of Rano Raraku - the quarry where they were carved.

When I got back to the cabin at the end of the day, I was all excited to stitch them together on my MacBook until I realized - iPhoto doesnt have a stitching tool.  Really?  Wow, not good.

So the pictures sat on my hard drive until I could dig around for a way to get it done.  Here are 3 photostitching solutions I tested out for Mac, PC .. and the easiest, on the iPhone.

PC: Autostitch.net
It's simple: download the free program, select the shots to stitch together and start.  There is an options panel where shutterbugs may mess more seriously with the options, but for someone like me who just wanted a panoramic shot, I left the defaults in.  It doesnt just have to be a linear shot, you can shoot above and below the horizon of the image you want for a much larger panoramic image.


Easter Island Panoramics

iPhone: Autostitch
This iPhone version of the PC program and it's a must download at just $1.99.  Just as the PC version, it's dead easy to use.  Simply use your iPhone camera to take a sequence of shots, trying to line up the images as you pan around, then launch the app.  In the app window, you select the photos you want stitched together and then voila!  They're stiched!

I used the app to take stitch together a number of shots from a soccer game to get the whole field into the panoramic.

20090712 zidane pano

Because
of difference in exposure, and not exactly keeping your iPhone on line
when you're taking the shots, you'll need to crop them after, but
iPhoto or Picnik or any other photo editor can easily do this.

Mac: Hugin
"Welcome to Hugin," says the opening screen prompt. "To create a panorama, just follow the sequence shown in the assistant tab."  Ahh .. easier said than done.

Whereas the other two stitchers will just do all the point matching for you, hugin wants you to go in to each image, find the stitch point and tell it what to do, and that ain't easy.
Even the help file admits things are difficult: "the control points editor is quite powerful, but its usage is not probably obvious on the first try."  Here's a hint: for the next version, make it more obvious Autostitch is plug and play, no thinking needed - Hugin took some reading, theory and planning and I still couldnt get it right.Whereas the other two stitchers will just do all the point matching for you, hugin wants you to go in to each image, find the stitch point and tell it what to do.  Autostitch was plug and play, no thinking needed - Hugin took some reading, theory and planning and I still couldnt get it right.


In the end, I gave up and took the images I wanted to make panoramic to my PC and had Autostitch do it there. The above shot took me about 20 minutes and I still couldnt figure out how to export it.  The one below took about 45 seconds.

Easter Island Panoramics
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What is your Mac solution for panoramic photostitching?

Oh, if you REALLY want to geek out with your photostitching, check out Microsoft's PhotoSynth .  Take as many photos of an area as you can at many different depths of focus.  Shoot tight, shoot wide, shoot high, shoot low, shoot in front, shoot behind, shoot above, shoot below.  Photosynth will then stitch them all together and create a virtual 3d image that you can zoom in and around.

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