Is there such a thing as a decent free photo stitching software?

I only need to make up 3 images for a one off

Ta

autostitch

I second that:
http://www.autostitch.net
The easiest stitching programme ever, and great results.

cheers, will go have a look….

I use Panorama Factory – not free but cheap (and there is a trial).

If you have a Canon camera, PhotoStitch that comes with that is pretty decent.

Windows Live Photo Gallery. Free, easy, awesome results and direct upload to Flickr.

Or for something more advanced, try ICE (also free):
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

Autostitch is great

Some examples

And it is auto, only thing done to these after putting them through autostitch is cropping the edges off

Best settings for autostitch from another place:

quality: 100 (obv,just the jpeg compression)
blending bands: 12 (or higher, helps get rid of edges, which don’t quite line up drifting into and out of existence)

for vertical panoramas it can help to rotate the images using Image rotation: anti/clockwise so that it comes out horizontal and you just rotate it back afterwards

a bit resource hungry but I’m getting ok results with this

ebygomm- love the 360×360 sphere/polar :0

Couple of reasons I like Panorama Factory:
It lets you select the important points to match up and can do a complete grid based warp which is really handy when you have parralax errors to deal with.
It can output as a photoshop file with each image on a seperate layer so you can manually adjust the blending.