I would love to have a camera that offers a panorama option, but they are way above my price range. However, a good option is to take a sequence of pics of a landscape (or any other subject) and stitch them together into a panorama. For this I use Serif Panorama Plus, which is simplicity itself. The software does only one thing, create panoramas, but it does it superbly well, even adjusting colours at the joining edges. The results are usually pretty seamless. I got my copy of this program free from a computer mag disk, but normally you have to pay for it. However, there are several good free programs out there:
The latest version of the free Irfanview has a panorama-creation tool, which can stitch pics horizontally or vertically. Some others:
Panorama stitching tools
Autostitch
Photopos Panorama Plus
An important tip for achieving good results is to keep your camera horizontal - if you point up or down, you will get some very curved straight lines in the panorama. Use a tripod if you can.
Incidentally, most inexpensive digital cameras have a lens roughly equivalent to a 38mm lens in film camera terms. This means they are a wide-angle lens, and therefore compress the horizontal picture. To get your pics back to a more realistic representation, you should ideally crop either the top, bottom or both, which is a semi-panorama anyway.
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1 comment:
Great stuff! Thanks for sharing.
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