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Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Issue 119

From Issue #119
March 2004

Mar 01, 2004  By Andrew Burton
 in
Build big scenic images from your small snapshots using this easy plugin for The GIMP.
Your Mileage May Vary

Obviously, Pandora can't cope well in every circumstance. Different amounts of light between photos, particularly when your photos include sky or water, make it difficult to create a consistent picture. This is most notable when shooting toward the sun. Moving subjects, such as cars or people, can result in the occurrence of ghosted images. Cityscapes containing a lot of right angles can emerge imperfectly when the angle of each photo is not perfect. Finally, if the source photos are not ideal, your results won't be either. A fixed tripod or at least holding the camera close to you with your elbows against your body gives a standard height and angle that can make your photos much easier to line up. The better your source photos, the less effort you need to use in making your panoramas fantastic.

As with most things, you can find tutorials and hints on creating panoramas on the Net. By using Pandora, it's possible for a rank amateur to come up with some great results, even with a limited knowledge of The GIMP and layers. The picture in Figure 4 shows a successful scene, where the sky and water tones are consistent and the edges are lined up.

Figure 4. Sydney from Cremorne Point—water and buildings are difficult, but the rewards are worth it.

Resources

Pandora is a small download from the Shallow Sky Web site: www.shallowsky.com/software/pandora.

Panoguide is the definitive resource for panoramic photos: www.panoguide.com.

Red Skies at Night (previously mentioned in LJ, April 2003) has some great GIMP tutorials for digital photography enthusiasts: cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/~jeschke/photography/articles/gimp/tutorials.shtml.

Andrew Burton (adb@iinet.net.au) lives in Sydney, Australia, where there is plenty of inspiration for taking panoramic photos.

______________________

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Good

luke watts's picture
Submitted by luke watts (not verified) on Fri, 07/23/2010 - 07:51.

Nice post............Thanks for sharing
-------------------------------------------
www.deepetch.com
Clipping path,Masking,Retouch,Color correction

copying finished picture to new image

rtpal14's picture
Submitted by rtpal14 (not verified) on Sun, 06/20/2010 - 22:07.

Thanks for the instructions. I was able to use your steps to stitch a panorama photo. But couldn't do last step to get rid of jagged edges... I selecting image with rectangle tool as suggested, but was not able to copy to new image. I copied image, opened new image, and pasted but everything closed up! Can anyone help?

Thanks!

copying finished picture to new image

rtpal14's picture
Submitted by rtpal14 (not verified) on Sun, 06/20/2010 - 22:04.

Thanks for the instructions. I was able to use your steps to stitch a panorama photo. But couldn't do last step to get rid of jagged edges... I selecting image with rectangle tool as suggested, but was not able to copy to new image. I copied image, opened new image, and pasted but everything closed up! Can anyone help?

Thanks!

Gimp as panoramic-maker

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 05/15/2010 - 10:08.

Gimp's great stuff to do some almagations like these. I used it e.g. for combining this foto http://www.stoliczek.net/kategorie/logo_user9.jpg ..

Wow!

panorama service 's picture
Submitted by panorama service (not verified) on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 02:19.

Extremely informative tutorial, well researched and clearly presented.Thanks for the hard work.

Regards,
panorama stitching

So where's the Windows port?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 04/20/2005 - 13:51.

So where's the Windows port? :-D

So where's the Windows port?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 05/15/2005 - 18:28.

What about 'porting' your PC to Linux? :-D

Never

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 02/13/2009 - 10:58.

Never

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 02/26/2004 - 03:00.

Ha, if you want something really straghtforward and s u b s t a n t i a l l y more powerful than what was described in the article, I highly recommend http://xmerge.sourceforge.net.

While its X11 interface is very spartan, its efficiency more than compensates for. But where it shines is the feature set. It's the user who decides which image feature is common for two pictures to be merged and the tool is not only translating but rotating the images as well. You can save the set of merging hints and reload them later. Oh, and unlike pandora, it does merge x-y matrixes, not only uni-dimensional panoramas.

I stumbled upon it while looking for a stitiching program and xmerge was a big relief after trying pandora and some other complex tools whose names I don't recall right now. I successfuly merged imperfect pictures in a 16 X 8 matrix and it was something like a 10 minutes job.

Serban

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/10/2004 - 03:00.

It is good to publicize tools like this. The GIMP Plugin registry is good but without binaries it isn't all that useful for end users. It would be great if there were a packages with extra Gimp plugins
(gimp-plugins-extra?)

Pandora will provide a good counter point to the new PhotoMerge tool in Adobe Photoshop.
It is such a shame that there is so much great functionality for the GIMP that users dont even know about because it is hard to find and use.

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/10/2004 - 03:00.

Ever considered to use panorame tools? http://www.path.unimelb.edu.au/~dersch/

Also look on sourceforge for hugin, which is a very good user interface for the panotools (which are script driven).

regards
Erik Krause

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/10/2004 - 03:00.

Or you can use http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/10/2004 - 03:00.

If you prefer a standalone application instead of a gimp plugin i would recomend http://hugin.sourceforge.net/.

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/10/2004 - 03:00.

Just checked out the website, and the app looks pretty complicated. Pandora is more a 'quick n dirty' way to do it, and appears much simpler.

I didn't know about this one before I wrote the article, though ;)

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/10/2004 - 03:00.

It'll get a lot simpler in the next version. basically:

1. give it a pile of images, it will select the control pointss automatically.
2. the optimising stuff will be simplified a lot.

hugin is based on Panorama Tools (with lots of additional stuff), and does perspective remapping correctly.

see the hugin authors websites (cited on hugin website)
for some example panoramas.

Pablo d'Angelo

Re: Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/10/2004 - 03:00.

This is great. I've been looking to do this for some time now.

Pandora

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 04/14/2005 - 10:13.

What a great piece of software! I obtained the rpm release after installing gimptool and on my first attempt created a flawless panoramic view of my apartment; it only took about two minutes. Very impressive--thanks so much for the suggestion.

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