Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello

I know we've had this topic not once but twice before, but the first time it was on WoS and the next time it was on Bistro, so I am bringing it back to the fore, because I finally found something that works (people had suggested a few alternatives but most did not work with the Mac. There was one that did, but I wanted to try before buying, and the free trial was windows only, so pah.

Anyway, I finally found Hugin, which is cross-platform and simple to use, and produces good results (though if anyone does use it you MUST keep the output in Tiff format for it to blend the seams smoothly, you can always convert to your chosen format afterwards.

You just click a recogniseable part of one photo, it finds the exact corresponding spot in the next photo, you ok it, do it a few times for each photo and Bob's your uncle.

Of course, after searching all of these months for something to do the job (and Hugin is free, by the way), the very day I installed it I realised that my printer software, which I have had installed for a couple of years, also has free photo-stitching/panorama making software included in with it, and had ben installed on my computer the whole time. (duh!)

The drivers and bundles software from HP are bundled here and available for every platform. Not being that up with computer knowledge I do not know if you can instal the software without physically having the printer, but the drivers are a free download and one of your clever lot is bound to know.

Anyway, the results are great and I made a great panorama of my back garden, but left it on my desktop Mac and so don't have it with me at the moment.

That looks excellent, so I'll give this a try tomorrow. Cheers, Mimi!

That seems fiddly, Meems. My usual Rec-Me-Do for this is Autostich which made this here thing from six photos:


click here for 9817x1604 version

You just feed AutoStich a directory of images and it does the rest by itself. You do need to pull up the options and increase the pixel count though, it defaults to quite a low number. It looks easier to use than the app you are posting. IIRC it came out of someone's PhD thesis, so it works well but has an interface that looks like crap.

Last time I brought this up someone had a better one based on the same codebase, which I thought was called Autopana but cannot find now.

.exe file + Mac =

I thought there was a Mac version -- but you are correct, there is not. Looks like that software someone else was on about it http://www.autopano.net/ here, and it has a Mac version but is not free. Bother.

yes, I saw that wen I was searching for such software and €99 seemed a bit expensive for something I'd use once in a while for fun. The panorama I made used two rows of four photos, so eight in total, and took around 5 minutes to do the first time I used it - I reckon it would take a minute or two any subsequent times. Oh, and I don't know if I was clear in my description - you do not have to match the points up yourself - click a part of your first photo - any part - the corner of a window, whatever, and anywhere in that general area of the second photo, and it will find the exact spot for you - it is an automatic process, not a manual one.

Also it is free

I'll try it out. Panaroma stitching is mathematically a very interesting problem (note that Hugin, like Autostich, has grown out of academic work), which is why there aren't more of these tools around -- it's a lot harder than it looks.

If you have one that works and you enjoy I'd stick to it, to be honest. I only put this up because of the specific problems of finding such a tool for use with a Mac without resorting to Flip or any windows emulator, which I cannot be bothered with.

As I say, though, if anyone knows if you can use the HP photostitching software without installing the actual drivers, that works a treat.

Both Autostitch and one of its commercial nephews Autopano Pro are Windows only yep.

I could never get Hugin to work.

I'll try that HP software now. Like all bundled printer software, I'd advise against installing it on principle. I wouldn't be suprised if after installing this, I have some cack in the system tray, my .JPG file associations are shot to hell and my context menu is full of 'E-Mail as greeting card', 'E-Mail as postcard', 'Get prints from crapprints.com'. I'm being cautious.

I think I've downloaded the wrong software. What's the software called that does the combining, Mimi?

It is called HP Photostitch Smart - it is bundled in with the HP drivers and such that I linked to. I installed the printer drivers and it installs that program along with it. I just installed those drivers onto my new computer and saved the link to remind myself to post it here, so it is definitely the right link. Maybe you need to actually connect an HP printer for it to work? i thought someone here might be able to see a way around that, if it were the case. I hope so, because it is so fast and easy to use. Just drag and drop the files and click the button. Five seconds later, even with huge files, it is all done.

It looks like this in operation:


You just drop the pictures in and press the button.

I quickly nipped out onto the balcony to take a few pictures so you can see the output. if you full view it you can see how smooth the joins are and it takes seconds.

Mimi -- can the HP software stitch in two dimensions, i.e. can it do (say) a 3x2 collection of photos? That's a common restriction on this software.

Yeah, I did download the wrong one. I downloaded HP Photosmart Essentials. Let's see how this one goes.

Two hundred megabytes...?

No, but I did one at home where I simply stitched the bottom four photographs, then the top four, then flipped both on their side and stitched those two panoramas together giving a single image from the original 4x2 pictures. It was so fast that it worked in seconds, so though not an automatic process, it really wasn't any hassle.

Yes, it was big, but I discarded all of the stuff I didn't want from my other mac (mostly because i have a new printer for that so didn't need the drivers, etc)

The photostitch software itself is quite small in size.

let me see if I can work out the actual size with my limited to no understanding of computers.

EDIT: yes, the photostitch is just 1.9MB of that total. I don't know if it is available separate from the driver software, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

It doesn't appear to be, and the installer for Windows is hideous hideous.

Oh, I meant to say, I never had any of this - either on this mac that has the bundled software all still on it or the new mac where I then un-installed everything except photostitch

That hideous? It just downloaded the same as anything else for my Mac - drop it in the folder and that was it.

It takes about fifteen minutes for the installer to validate itself, and the install takes about another half an hour on top of that. I don't know what it was doing or whether it had an allegric reaction to this computer here, but that really ain't right.

I've put these 200Mb ish HP printer driver bundles on two computers recently (one set for a Laserjet P1006, one set for a C5180 all-in-one. It installed fairly quickly, seems to be quite smart about auto-updated each bit of the package individually, and didn't spew crap all over the system either.

Well, I don't know what to say, Mr D - I never had any kid of troubles when putting it on my Mac - it was quick (taking into account the large initial file size) and never did anything that I didn't want to (didn't stick all of my photos in some horrible gallery (I had a printer that did that once) didn't alter my file extension settings or anything like that - just installed what I wanted (as well as the drivers) and then let me delete everything I didn't want.