I’ve been using autostitch for a while and it’s great at most things. It’s struggling with a panorama taken this morning though. Plenty of overlap, it just won’t find the features.

What can anyone recommend that has a better chance of finding the matches or some manual input to get it going? Freeware is possible but I wouldn’t mind trying something out it it has a trial version!

Sometimes doing it manually is the only way, putting each pic on a separate layer and nudging them and rotating about a selected point until they align, and using a soft brush to blur edges. Having said that, it’s damned laborious, so it’s a last resort. Not really familiar with panorama ‘ware, so can’t help much there, I’m afraid.

Canon photostitch is pretty good – and free if you can find it/have a Canon. But we also generally use the 30% overlap rule on each pic in the series of the pan so you can increase the likelihood of a good match. Oh yeah, and use a tripod if you’re able to.

Autostitch is the bollocks – it stitches every bit as well as, actually better than Photoshop CS5.

When you shoot your panos, are you ensuring the exposure is the same for each shot (shutter speed and apperture should be the same in every shot)? And are you overlapping each shot by about 50%?

I’ve used autostitch professionally to put together visual impact assessment studies and whilst it does occasionally smooth out the odd detail, I’ve never had a problem with it, even over 360 degree panos….

Try http://www.panoramafactory.com/

It does a nice deformable mesh which let’s you deal with tricky bits and parallax errors, plus ut outputs a PSD with each photo on a different layer so you can fine tune the blending.

Had the Canon one and wasn’t too impressed. Now use Arcsoft Panorama Maker 4, which came as a freebie on a CD with the last camera I bought and does the job pretty well, although there isn’t much scope for tweaking the images.

Microsoft ICE

You literally just select the pics and click go, as long as the exposure isn’t wildly out it works really well.