First try at Photo-stitching

I have read about how it is possible to create ultra-high resolution images by stitching many images together previously, but I didn’t try it out because I didn’t have Photoshop or other similar imaging software. (My main imaging tool has been Nikon’s Capture NX 2.

Recently, I installed a demo version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 11, which comes with Adobe’s Photomerge tool, an automated photo-stitching function. You may watch a tutorial video by Adobe here, but all you really need is a bit of common sense.

PANORAMAS WITH A 90MM LENS? No problem! With Adobe’s excellent Photomerge, you can create 60-megapixel panoramic images like this quite easily!

So I found myself at Kumamoto Castle in Japan’s Kyushu island today, and found the perfect vantage point to take a wide-angle shot of the main castle building. The problem is, with my current Fujifilm X-Pro1 camera, I didn’t have a lens that was of the right focal length to get the perfect framing – the 18mm f2 (28mm equivalent on 35mm film) is too wide, and 60mm f2.4 (90mm equivalent) is too long.

Here’s what the 18mm can take in one shot:

Here’s the most the 60mm can capture in one shot:

This is what I took using 60mm and the X-Pro1’s built-in panoramic feature, which requires you to slowly pan across the scene in one direction (the direction must be specified beforehand):

It took me quite a few tries to get the right shot, as any shaking during the panning could spoil the stitching. Useful in a pinch, but I was hoping for something a little more fool-proof, and a method that allows me to save the images in RAW format.

Then I remember the photo-stitching technique, which I had read about a long while back, and now that my Photoshop Elements trial is still valid for another 12 days, I might as well give Photomerge a go. And given that the 60mm has much better edge-to-edge sharpness, I chose to use it for this experiment.

Here’s roughly how the images stack up:

I didn’t have a panning tripod with me (have stopped travelling with those things since 2009), so the images weren’t taken in exact straight lines. But the software is intelligent enough to match them according to the overlapping areas. Nifty.

Think I might buy the full retail version of Photoshop Elements for this feature alone. The software is also great for DNG processing and has other minor editing functions I could use, such as creating montages and adding text to images.

Hope this helps you get on the stitching bandwagon!

Just a warning though; stitching is extremely CPU-intensive so do try it on a higher-spec machine. My Thinkpad X201 Tablet with the Intel i7-620LM processor and 8GB RAM struggled a little with the stitching, taking about five minutes for the process (admittedly, I lost track of time while waiting). The final TIFF output using JPG files as source was almost 200MB big. I wouldn’t recommend trying Photomerge with anything less powerful!