Photostitching

[Steve Jepson]

Could anyone recommend some good photo-stitching software ?

I am using an A700 with a SAL1680Z, SAL135mm F1.8Z

I want to stich 3 or 4 pictures to together end to end for use as backgrounds in rendering.

Do I have to use a panoramic tripod for this or does it not matter that much what the overlap is?

Something like this www.panoramafactory.com/index.html
is what I think I am looking for ?

Any suggestions ? Any one photo-stitching to make backgrounds for renderings ?

[Chadwick]

I ran into a program called Autostitch that is free of use and relatively easy to learn. I used to stitch together shots of the Swiss Alps I took when I was over there and it worked absolutely wonderful.

Autostitch

[Steve Jepson]

wow. I like this one.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/panogallery/redtit.html

free is good.

[Anonymous]

I've used PTGui and was hugely impressed with the result - even from handheld shots to make up a 360 panorama. Quick to produce, and it's very smart.

Once you have the result, I recommend cutting out the skyline in PS and making the sky area transparent; cropping as low as possible; saving out to TIFF; mapping it to the inside of a circular wall, keeping the height as low as poss as it affects the sun when it's set to a low angle. Do some maths to determine wall size relative to image size, so it's seamless.
I use this setup + a generic sky background that matches the light quality of when the pics were taken.

[Dwight]

What complications occur when the wall is a complete circle?

[Steve Jepson]

64bit demo here http://www.ptgui.com/download.html

[vistasp]

If you want free, open source AND cross-platform, go to:

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

And don't forget to get the plugins for automatic control point creation and blending.

[Anonymous]

Good point Dwight ... It wasn't a complete circle - I made it as close as possible with the smallest of gaps (which doesn't get noticed). Closing the circle makes the wall disappear/go haywire/????

So why can't I close the circle without these "complications"?

[Dwight]

The outcome i was expecting was that a completely circular wall splits into two equal parts. Using one map as a wall material requires special 3D material alignment.

[henrypootel]

AutoPano from Kolor is a great product:
http://www.autopano.net/
It does pretty much everything for you, gets rid of ghosting automatically, and supports HDR. It's a good 'un.