Hi,

I'm interested to know what you used to stitch these photos together, as my efforts leave a much less polished finish.

Glad you like it.

Thinking back, two years ago, it would probably be Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 - which I still use. It was a manual effort - not one of those auto-stitching tools you get.

The key is in the original photos, having a camera that allows you to lock everything down between shots, so the exposure is a close as possible between them helps a lot.

Make sure to leave a good overlap between each shot too.

Next, pull them all in as separate layers and then fine tune the colour balance, hue, saturation, etc. etc. until the colouring is as close as possible in each shot.

Then, line everything up, straightening as necessary, maybe even some perspective correction.

Tweak things by adjusting the tranparency between the layers at the edges to get a good mix at the join. Then start smudging and cloning around the join to get rid of the bits that are never going to line up.

There you go - five minutes and its done - or was it five weeks? ;)

That's a especially lovely job considering it's hand-done.

I never thought of using transparency for this sort of thing (believe it or not).

In the end, I actually fell in with the look of joining up the segments as if you were pinning physical photographs together post development, so refuse to allow myself to do anything other than rotate + overlap these days.

Thanks :D

The transparency also helps when getting the colouring right between the layers. Mucking about with the layer order whilst they are overlapping also helps.

If you look close you'll see that the coluring isn't right between either end. I tend to get the colouring roughly correct among all the shots and then work across matching each one more closely to its neighbour so you get a bit of drift as you go.

It's a shame it comes out so small here. The original is 7936 x 1428.
</p>

You can look at the original size of the photo by hitting the "All Sizes" link above it.

I have already closely examined the 7936x1428 version...

Oh wow!
Last time I tried all I could see was "Medium".
I Must have been looking at a smaller image.

I too, had a closer look at the largest size. It's so cool!

It would be really really cool, if a photo was 360 degrees and the scrollbar of the photo would never end...just keep rotating and rotating.

You would need to be on top of a mountain and take shots all round, or fake it by blending the edges together somehow. You could maybe do some Javascript to keep repeating the images as you approached the edges. A compromise would be two or three wraps stitched together so it would appear to keep going for a while anyway.

Yeah really nice job of blending.