Even with a super-wide-angle lens, it’s not always possible to capture the full splendor of a magnificent panorama, and you may not have a 180-degree-covering fisheye lens handy!
One great option is to take a series of images rotating your camera to cover different parts of the panorama, and then stitch the images together later to create a panoramic image. Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is a free tool from Microsoft Research which lets you do exactly that.
Though there are many image stitching applications out there, including commercial ones, I like Microsoft ICE because:
- It's free!
- It does an excellent job of stitching together images seamlessly.
- It has a wide range of output formats including JPG, TIFF and Photoshop as well as multi-resolution formats like Silverlight Deep Zoom
- Did I mention it's free?
Creating A Panoramic Image With ICE
Stitching together photos to create a panoramic image with ICE is pretty simple:
- Fire up Microsoft ICE.
- Pick the images you want to use for the panorama – you can drag and drop them into the ICE window.
- ICE reads the source images and creates a composite. It automatically picks the appropriate camera motion. If you stood in one position and panned horizontally to get your panoramic images it will pick “Rotating Motion”.
- Crop the composite image to taste, using the cropping handlebars.
- Pick the export format and scaling for the output image and export to your format of choice. The images can get pretty big, so you may want to scale the output down unless you want a large image file.
- The exported image!
In Conclusion...
If you’re looking for an easy way to stitch photographs together to create panoramic images, Microsoft ICE is an easy-to-use option which works very well. It's free, and is definitely worth a look!
Microsoft uses the same technology in Windows Live Photo Gallery, so if you use that, you have the capability to create panoramic images already.
Microsoft ICE can be downloaded here.
