Technology never ceases to amaze me. It’s been a long time since I attempted to stitch images together; last time was probably five years ago and the results were.. mediocre. While I was in the process of writing the post about eliminating the smoke odor in our new 2009 Mercury Sable, I wanted to toss a picture of the car up.. but I was being lazy and just had my 50mm lens mounted on the camera, and didn’t feel like changing it. This resulted in a suboptimal picture (the one at the top of that post), but I also did something that I forgot about until later..
As anyone who has used a 50mm lens on a DSLR with an APS sized sensor knows, that lens isn’t exactly ideal for taking a photo of a car sitting in your driveway from your garage (unless your driveway is, well, long), but I figured why not? I ended up with the picture that you see on that post, but on a whim, I had also taken pictures to try to stitch together and see what it looked like. I completely forgot about those photos until I happened to be browsing through Lightroom a few days ago.. I saw them, and went huh, wonder what it’d take to stitch them. Having no idea how to do this with modern software, I highlighted them, and went to right-click to say edit in Photoshop. Much to my surprise, there is now an option to let Photoshop automatically stitch the images in that context menu.. I thought I might as well give it a shot, and here’s the result (click image for a larger version):
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I was quite surprised to see how well Photoshop handles this now, especially with handheld shots that were not rotating around the correct axis, etc. Since I took the pictures and have the originals, I can see where it was stitched, but it still looks pretty darn good to me – what do you think?
I will have to play with stitching more often.. it is certainly much better now than it used to be!
That certainly turned out well. What version of photoshop are you using? I’m on an older version of photoshop at home, and at work – and I don’t think that stitching is even an option in those old versions. For panoramas and stitching I use a software called autostitch which usually works exceedingly well for a free software. Here’s a panorama I took at the twins game last week. 7-8 photos stitched with autostitch:
Target Field Panorama
This is Photoshop CS4, and Lightroom 2. That’s a great pic! Handheld or tripod?