Create an awesome panoramic photo, without special equipment

This tutorial will show you how to create an awesome-looking panoramic photograph, using a normal point-and-shoot camera, without any special lenses.

EDIT: This instructable has become somehwhat obsolete. There's a piece of freeware that will automate the Panorama-creating process, called Autostitch. Here it it is: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Step 1 Get everything you need.

You will need:
1) A digital camera, or a film camera and some way to get the pictures onto your computer. I reccomend a digital camera, though, since there will be alot of trial-and-error, and if you use a film camera, you'll just end up wasting film.
2) Hugin, a free program, which is available here: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/
3) Autopano-sift, another free program which is available here: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift/#download
4) The image editing program of your choice. I prefer the GIMP.

EDIT: This instructable has become somehwhat obsolete. There's a piece of freeware that will automate the Panorama-creating process, called Autostitch. Here it it is: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Comments

[KABUKISTAR]

The thing about Photoshop, is it may do this all automatically, but it also costs $150, where all the programs I use in this tutorial are free. That Autostitch program is really cool, though, Scholewiak. Good post.

[Fake_Name]

I think thats cheating...

[paperrhino]

A tool I use is PanaVue: http://www.panavue.com/
It was recommended to me by a professional photographer as his tool of choice. The professional version costs about as much as PhotoShop CS but it was the only tool I was able to successfully stitch together some of my panorama shots well enough to create large prints. Both Hugin and PhotoShop CS failed (I didn't run across AutoStitch when I was looking for tools but I did run across AutoPano which failed also).

So, if it is really important and all else fails, it is a great tool.

[SCholewiak]

I'd highly recommend Autostich (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html).
Autostich makes it incredibly easy to make panoramas because all you have to do is take the pictures and drop them onto the program. No settings that you need to worry about and the output is spectacular. Attached is a pseudo wide-angle photo of the Rotunda, at the University of Virginia, which was created with about 12 source photos, and a panorama of my one of the serpentine walls in the gardens surrounding the Lawn.

[intoon]

if you have photoshop cs, you can do this same thing, but much easier

[theRIAA]

yep, CS does everything for you. if you have some crazy pictures that CS dosent know what to do with, you just snap the pecies together like a puzzle.

[ll.13]

cool, i wondered how they did it. also check out this website the panoramas go 360 up and down all the way (most of them)

http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp305/RegionIndex.html#Europe