UKC

Does anyone know of any free, or cheap, photostitching software which can cope with stitching multiple rows of stitched photos (ie. stitching a row of stitched photos on top of another row of stitched photos). I use an old version of arcsoft panorama maker, which is fine for stitching side by side photos, but refuses to stitch multiple rows of stitched photos.

Ta

In reply to MattDTC:
It's not very user friendly but hugin is free and should be able to handle it.

In reply to MattDTC:

could you stitch each row as an image (top, middle and bottom, say) and then use each rows output as the input for the final image?

but Mike is right hugin should be able to do that for you

In reply to MattDTC:

I used to use autopano pro.

In reply to MattDTC:

Autostitch and hugin can both manage it. The free version of autostitch is limited in the size of pano it can generate (32 bit), and hugin is a bit fiddly to use.

In reply to MattDTC: For future reference, you may be able to avoid a double row by shooting in portrait orientation.

In reply to MattDTC:

AutoPano Pro. 99 Euros.

In reply to davidbeynon:

I can't get hugin to produce sensible output for a vertical panorama (i.e. 2 or 3 shots one above the other). Even rotating the images 90 degrees doesn't work - any tips would be very welcome!

In reply to MattDTC:

Try Microsoft ICE, it's free and you can just bung everything at it. Might work better if you have all the original photos though (horizontal and vertical)

In reply to due:

That's hard to answer without looking at your images.

Is the problem that it is failing to match overlapping areas of your images correctly, or that the orientation & projection of the results are wrong?

If it's the former then you can manually add control points to pairs of images. This is boring as hell, but never fails.

If it's the projection & orientation then the preview tool lets you tweak that, although it's a right pain in the backside to use.

In reply to MattDTC:

Thanks for the replies.
Microsoft ICE sounds like it might be what I'm after - I'll download it and have a look. If anyone else is interested, here's the link for free download;

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

In reply to davidbeynon:

It says something along the lines of "can't stitch because resolution is different on the two images". So it won't even try to do a stitch.

In reply to MattDTC:

And the images hadn't been edited beforehand? If they were straight off the camera then that's very odd.

In reply to MattDTC:

Just a guess but might auto setting on camera changed ISO between shots?

In reply to davidbeynon:

The two images were individually made up of several photos stiched in a row, so I was trying to stitch two pre-stitched photos, one on top of the other,if you get my meaning.

I've had a quick look at Microsoft ICE and it looks like it does what I want

In reply to MattDTC:

I see. Yeah, hugin can't cope with that but would be fine if you fed it all the original images.

In reply to due: Wow, just tried ICE on a wide angle pano and what an improvement on Panorama factory! Had to pick points to prevent ghosting previously, ICE just did it correctly.

In reply to MattDTC:
In general I don't think you can (or should) stitch picture which are themselve stitched panos. The joins from the first stitch will create very non-analytical distortions which the warping functions will not be able to deal with. You need to use a multi-row stitcher like hugin or autopano which can optimise in both dimensions simultaneously. Hugin can be a PITA, but once you figure it out it's very good.