Best Free Digital Image Stitcher
What is a stitch program? Quite simply, if you have taken a series of photographs of a scene that you would like to piece together as one picture, then this is what you're looking for.
Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor). I am very, very impressed with this photographic image stitcher. This is a BETA software and Microsoft are offering it free, but I am not sure if this will remain so when it comes out of BETA. The first thing you have to have of course is some pics to stitch together and I have tried a number of different images from 2 to 8 the stitching of the images worked very well on all the panoramic pictures, whether it was vertical or horizonal. Opening formats it accepts:
- JPG
- BMP
- TIFF
- PNG
- HD Photo files
There are four modes of camera motion to stitch your sequence of images, three fixed and one that you can adjust the distortion and that the 'Rotation motion'. When in this mode just click the 3D icon on the top taskbar, where you can tilt, zoom in and out. When you are happy with your construction then you can leave the cropping to another imaging software or auto crop. The finished panoramic image is exported into:
- JPG
- TIFF
- Adobe Photoshop
- HD View Tileset
- Deep Zoom Tileset
- Windows Bitmap
- PNG
- HD Photo image
As an added bonus .psd you can export in layers! Any other alterations can be achieved in your image software. The project can be saved as a .spi file enabling quick access if you so wish to return and alter the image again. I have read on several sites that the Fisheyed lens shots are not quite successful, but for most of us it does the job extremely well. If you have a Fisheye lens it would be great to inform us how you get on with it.
Autostitch, a program written by Matthew Brown, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia.
It comes complete with some sample pictures for you to play with. Select File/Open and choose your pictures, and then just sit back and wait while it formats the photos into a single combined panorama. All lighting corrections and blending are done for you. The downside of this program is some arcing in the panorama that leaves black edges. You will need to crop the panorama to get clean edges.
Panorama Perfect Lite. It's the freeware version of a commercial product, but the only difference I can see is a limitation on the size of the panorama picture it can produce. However, this should not be a constraint for most users.
The strength of this software is its ability to match up photos taken without a tripod. Using nodes on the blending area of each photo, you can match each structure (tree, building etc.) to ensure that there is no distortion when joining. Although more complex, this process allows a better stitch without the bending and distortion you sometimes get with Autostitch. This difference will not be important to casual photographers, but more serious users will consider the effort worthwhile.
Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is an allrounder for managing your photos (much the same as Picasa), but a little-publicised feature is available in the Make menu: "Panorama Stitcher". It is a no-brainer - simply select the photos from the thumbnails viewer, and the program does the rest. Cropping and adjustment is immediately at hand under the Fix menu. The program works much like Autostitch. The blending results, incidentally, are superior as compared to purchased programms such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. Highly recommended all around.
ICE (Image Comosite Editor)
Website: research.microsoft.com/ivm/ice.html
Author: Microsoft Corporation
License: Freeware (not sure how long as BETA version)
Download size: 3MB
Operating system supported: Windows XP/Vista
32Bit and 64Bit versions available
Autostitch
Website: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
Author: Matthew Brown
License: Free time limited demonstration version. License can be renewed by re-downloading.
Download size: 1053kb
Operating systems supported: 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista
Panorama Perfect Lite
Website: http://www.volny.cz/panopohanka/index.htm
Author: Michal Pohanka
License: Freeware
Download size: 1.93MB
Operating systems supported: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Website: http://get.live.com/photogallery/features
Author: Microsoft
License: Freeware
Download Size: 2.28MB
Operating systems supported: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
This software category is maintained by volunteer editor Tony Bennett.
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Microsoft Labs also offers a 3D stitcher: http://photosynth.net/
As of October 7th and 8th, I am NOT ABLE to download this Beta program from the links posted to Microsoft's Research Center.
October 8. I just downloaded and installed it. No problem.
WOT addon for Firefox tells me that Panorama Perfect lite site is a dangerous one for reliability and privacy. That may or may not be the case but use precaution. Based on comments on Firefox web site, reliability problems may be due to fact WOT does not like some sites which are actually ok.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=wot
What the heck is MS doing in the visual design area ?!? If they are creating a market beyond Adobe they have my support...
Gosh, it looked so promising!
I installed ICE and proceeded to test it right away with four 10mpx uncompressed TIFs. I know that's a bit demanding but modern stitching programs should handle it with no problems.
Well, after loading the pics it read 'solving...' and was like that for so long I thought my PC had hanged, until I clicked on cancel and the process was stopped. I tried again and had the same result. I thought it could be because of the number of photos or their size, so I tried just two 3mpx JPGs. The same thing again. At my fourth attempt I happened to click on the cube in the toolbar while the operation was still displaying the 'solving' message and... at last! The thing isn't obvious at all, if that's the way it's intended to work. Probably it isn't.
Then I was able to go through the functions and I really understand why you're so enthusiastic about it, Tony. Really nice capabilities, though I miss a color matching option. However, that's not much to complain about in a free program.
But... something went wrong. I clicked on the 'exit' button and the program closed after prompting to save the project. A minute later I tried to open it again and the typical 'ICE has found a problem and must be closed...' appeared on screen. And that was so for as many times as I tried. I thought I'd better reinstall it and went to the program folder just to find there's no uninstaller.
I'll try overwriting the old folder, but that'll be tomorrow. We'll see.
These issues might be specific to my setup, but they shouldn't be there. Yes, I know it's a beta, but I don't know whether to think Microsoft are again neglecting basic aspects or they are unaware of them. Anyway, I think it's best if I report the bugs. Hopefully they'll fix them.
Marc
Actually Marc I had a few problems and uninstalled it with Revo and then reinstalled it. I would suggest you do that first rather than over write it, it should work fine then, it is a BETA. There is one more bug and that is if it doesn't appear click on the image area and it will come up. As you say these will be fixed. But, don't let this put you off the results are the best I have seen from a free panoramic software that is easy to handle. I am not aware of a free program straight off the top of my head that does colour matching. Freeware panoramic software is a bit thin on the ground, especially anything that produces anything worth while and that is not complex.
Tony
I did as you advised, Tony, but the issue remains. After using Revo I reinstalled ICE and had no poblems working with it, except for the 'solving' bug. But then I closed it and it won't start again. The error window appears every time I try.
Sad, because I agree the results are very good.
Marc
I vote for Hugin, too.
Hugin, is a good Open scource stitch program. It is however a very difficult program for most to get to grips with. It does have a few WYSIWYG aspects to it, but much of the information it requires needs a lot of knowledge more than the average user would possibly know. I do use it on odd occasions. But, then I sometimes get my lens info all up the creek.
Tony
I have recently discovered Hugin, a very nice piece of work, fully automatic, and also all the techinical stuff transparent to you if you like playing with the numbers.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
For a different kind of stitching, you might want to include Microsoft's GroupShot. This allows you to stitch together the best portrait from a series of similar portrait shots.
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