Creating Panoramas

When we see panorama pictures we tend to think that these are taken with very specialized equipment. While this might generally be true, there are very easy ways of creating our own high resolution panorama with only a point and shoot camera or even a camera phone.

In this post. We,re going to learn how to use Hugin, an open source program, to create our own panoramas.

First of all we have to take the pictures. You need to take several pictures, as many as you want, that overlap themsleves partially on the sides, like this:



The overlapped area doesn't need to be as big as in the example, it will be enough with overlapping 30% of the image.

This will help the software find similarities between the images in order to stitch them together properly.

Now we will install the program. Download the installer from here. Once the program is installed, launch it and load the images you want to use for your panorama. Click on the load images button. Once you have selected the images, the program will start to align them automatically, if not click on the align button. This process may take some time depending on your computer and the size of your images, once it's finished you'll be presented with an image like this:



You can adjust the margins here so that you've got no black background, but I recommend you fix this in photoshop or any other editing program later. When finished close this window.

Now you only have to click on Create panorama. Select the folder and filename and you're done. Hugin will automatically stitch the images together and blend the margins making it look as a single image. When the process finishes, as before this may take some time, you'll have you image saved in .tif format.

Open it in your favourite editing software, cut off the black areas and you'll get something like this:

As you see this tecnique requires no special equipment and is very easy to learn. You can use any shots you want even those from a camera phone if the quality is enough. This is what I got from a couple of shot taken with an N95.

If you want your image to be of even higher resolution you can take the shots vertically, which will allow you to use more shots to put together the same field of view. This example is made with 5 vertical shots put together.

So, as we've seen it's very easy to create your own panorama shots by just shooting consecutive images and then stitching them together on the pc. Next time you go shoting landscapes, give it a try!