Chinwag's Roof Panorama Stitch-Up

Sam Michel — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:51:41 +0000

Ever since I came back from Thinking Digital complete with copious quantities of notes, I've been meaning to write up some of the great sessions at the conference. One day - probably - I'll actually find some time to do it.

This afternoon one of those sessions sprung to mind. Steve Clayton, of Geek in Disguise and Blue Monster fame demo'ed some of the latest and greatest new software gadgets freshly minted from MSs' labs. Amongst these was a rather natty, and free, stitching application.

Steve being Steve, showed a live stitch of pictures he'd snapped at Manchester United's football ground. Bravely he tried a live demo which worked suspiciously well (he later redeemed credibility when a Popfly demo refused to work).

As I was shuffling out of Chinwag's office this evening, closing up for the night, I as shutting the door to the roof, what greeted me was a classic London cityscape bathed in a setting sun.

Summer can be fleeting, at best, in London, so I grabbed the camera and decided to give this new fangled photo-stitching-panorama-making thingy a proper workout. If it can make anything resembling a photographic silk purse from my sow's ear photography, I'd be impressed.

Did it work? You be the judge. Here's my slightly dodgy original pictures:

First step, downloading the Windows Live Photo Gallery. I'm running Windows under Parallels on a Mac and the install was dead simple - although it doesn't half annoy me when Microsoft tries to install every bleeding add-on under the sun and set all my defaults to MSN this that and the other during installs.

Still, the download and install took about 10 minutes and the software automatically picked up all the photos that I have stored in iPhoto. Having select the photos to stitch together, the process churned for about three minutes, producing this:

Bit tricky to tell at this size, but check out the large or original versions for the full-on effect.

The bigger the monitor, the better. Impressive, especially considering the speed of the process and the dodgy quality of the originals. Definitely something I'll be playing with again, perhaps a better photographer wouldn't be a bad idea either

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Chinwag's Roof Panorama Stitch-Up