Some helpful photo tools

Fix blurred photographs with free software, Unshake. It really does work, and it's great for those cellphone pics that don't quite cut it, although it takes a bit of experimentation to get best results.
Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the application creates a high-resolution panorama that seamlessly combines the original images. This is nice.

Panorama photos

I have blogged a couple of times about software to stitch together several photos into a panorama. In the process, I overlooked the obvious. Microsoft has a neat free program called Image Composite Editor that also does the job well. Admittedly, it's one of several rather unsung projects from Microsoft Research that the company doesn't talk about much, so I'm using that as my excuse.

Panorama photos

Back in February I posted about the difficulty of finding a good free program to create panorama photos. I use Serif Panorama Plus, which does the job of stitching several pics together very nicely, but it is a paid program. However, I have just come across an updated version of http://www.image-editor.net/Pos-Panorama-Pro-Panoramic-Image-Software.asp?RefName=PosPanoramaPro1.00, which used to be commercial but has now been turned into a free program. Having given it a quick trial, I can thoroughly recommend it. In fact it has a very good feature missing in Serif Panorama - the ability to create vertical panoramas. It also allows greater control over the way in which the pics are combined, and the resolution of the end product. I think I will be switching permanently.
Incidentally, did you realise that the average digital camera has a wide-angle lens? In the old days of film cameras, the average lens had a focal length of 50mm, so the resulting photograph was pretty close to how the eye sees things. But most digital cameras are more like 35mm. This means that you are getting a horizontally compressed photograph which is not true to life. To bring things back to better perspective, I suggest trimming either the top, bottom or both of the photo, which will give a semi-panorama anyway.

Another whoops!

I had not actually tried Irfanview's panorama feature before recommending it in a post last week. I tried it today. Ummm ... not good. Apologies. A sad blot on an otherwise remarkable bit of software. I did retry Autostitch, and that seems to be the best bet of the free programs.

Panorama photos

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.