Tutorial: Panoramic photos with autostitch

Developed by Matthew Brown and David G. Lowe, autostitch is a software tool for creating panoramas. It is proprietary, but free to download and use. The only restriction is that you must acknowledge that you used autostitch for your panoramic photos.

In this article, I will try to explain how to use autostitch to create 360-degree panoramic images.

First of all, you must take your photos. I found that it is easier to stitch when the photos were taken in portrait (i.e. vertical) mode. Here you can see the images I used for this panorama:

Note that the photos cover more than 360-degrees. The photo IMG_2821.JPG is almost the same as IMG_2823.JPG. That is why my first photo will be IMG_2821.JPG, and the last one IMG_2837.JPG (because they partly overlaps).

Neighbor photos must overlap. And the bigger the overlapping area -- the easier will be to stitch them together:

When you download and unzip autostich, you just have to start autostitch.exe. Autostitch works fine even on linux (I tried it on Ubuntu 6.10 with wine).

This is how it looks like:

Next thing is to tell autostitch about the width of your panorama. Select Edit->Options and select your desired with in the in the field Width (pixels). Default value is 1400px. I usually choose 5000 or 6000 pixels:

Click OK, and then File->Open and then select your images:

When selected autostitch will automatically start the stitching process:

When stitching is finished -- autostitch will create a pano.jpg image in the same directory:

As you see - pano.jpg have those black areas at the top and bottom. You must crop them out... Here is how to do it with GIMP:

But you can use any other photo-processing software...

And then you can play with the saturation, contrast, color balance, and similar options... And here is the result:

Click here to see it on panoye.com.

This is how I make my panoramas. But, I'm a programmer, not a professional photographer and there are many subleties I don't know. Feel free to comment on how to make this tutorial better!