2. Stitching your
panorama

Autostitch only works with jpegs. If you don’t have images to stitch,
you should read this article, and then make some. Autostitch can
scan a directory of multiple images and find and stitch the multiple
panoramas it contains. It has very basic controls, so a little
preparation increases your chances of success.

• Separate your images of multiple
  panoramas of the
  same subject.

Autostitch can’t differentiate between multiple panoramas of the same
subject, and will attempt to stitch them all together so move them into separate folders.

• Rotate your portrait oriented images

It also doesn’t rotate images very well, so you should rotate
them before stitching .

• Fix white balance and exposure.

If you used automatic white balance and
exposure, one or
two in a panoramic series might be a little dark, or have a color cast
to them. Fixing them before stitching gives you more control, and fewer
surprises.

• Resize to final output.

If you know you are only going to need a small version of the panorama
for web display for example, resizing the images by 50 percent or more
will lower the chances of memory issues, and speed up stitching.

Getting Started with Autostitch

Use File>Open to select the images you want to stitch. This can
be
multiple panoramas, as long as there is not any overlap between the
final output. Give it a try. The software generates an image in the
original directory named pano.jpg. It also attempts, with varied
success, to open the image in your default image viewer. In any case
you
can open the image yourself from the directory and take a look. You
will need to rename any panoramas you like before running autostitch
again, because it will overwrite any pano.jpg in its output directory.
You may get memory errors after stitching a few times. Just restart the
program to clear everything. However, you will lose any settings you
changed in
the options menu. 
 
Setting Autostitch Options

For better results, you should tweak the option settings. The
readme.txt file that comes in the zip pretty well explains the software
options, found under Edit>Options. I will paraphrase here.

• Output size

Start small and increase the size if you like the results. Twenty-five
percent is good for five or six 3 megapixel images, but
usually I
would start at 10%.

• Blending Mode

Multiband is the only choice. Get the best quality you can. I leave the
default settings for bands and sigma.

• Gain Compensation

Leave it off. You corrected it before the stitch.

• Auto Crop

It usually works ok, so I leave it on unless I am having problems.

• Auto Straighten

Again, it usually works ok, so I leave it on unless I am having
problems.

• Image Rotation

Leave it off, we manually rotated before the stitching.

• Other Options

I usually increase the memory to half of my system RAM, and use 100 for
the best quality jpeg output.

3. Results with
Autostitch

I fed 20 images into Autostitch, and eight were stitched into a
panorama. Here is what I got:

It is a 360 degree stitch, handheld, taken in part from the back of a
bicycle. Stitching quality is great, and the image captures the
landscape. There are a couple of ghosts due to people moving and it
needs a good cropping. Most people are in the shot twice, while one person is
in it three times. I will admit that it didn’t go up on my wall, but it
did get me started on my journey into panoramic photography, and I
didn’t have to buy any software or hardware.  If you want to
see impressive numbers of great autostitch panoramas, head
over to
flickr.
The lesson here is that, in many circumstances, you can use free software
to stitch a series of digital photos into a panorama without a lot of
forethought. Give it a try.

Additional Panorama Resources:

The Panotools
Wiki tutorials
cover
many aspects of panoramic photography, with an emphasis on
…(drum roll please) … panotools and related software. Panotools is
the real deal, and you
can’t go wrong browsing around. The tutorials are marked by difficulty
from beginner to advanced

PTgui is another well regarded panotools interface

Canon PhotoStitch is a free and easy autostitcher that comes with Canon
cameras.  Here are a couple of links for more information:
#1, #2