Building Panoramic Images

Panoramic landscapes make for beautiful pictures. There is nothing like the feeling of relaxation and tranquility is achieved by looking more vivid images of sweeping wilderness, less the hassle of actually get there. Using a digital camera, it is possible to stitch images to simulate the effects of an expensive filter landscape. After I bought my digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix 4300) and set it to work under Linux, get the software to stitch images and was my next task.

The Nikon Coolpix 4300, like most digital cameras come with a CD of software to perform rudimentary image stitching. Unfortunately, the software is not Linux. Through Google, it was difficult to find something that works in Linux, until I remembered The GIMP. There are two ways to use the GIMP to create a panoramic photo, easy and difficult. How difficult is to build layers of different photos, edit filter masks and transparency of the layer and play around with the layers by hand.

How to Taking the pictures

Whether you are shooting inside or outside, and especially if you are planning to shoot a particular event such as a sunset, it is a good idea to arrive early at the location of you shot as a proper setup can take some time.
Camera Setup:
What follows is the most important tip of the whole article: Put your camera in all manual mode, including manual focus.
This will ensure all the sub pictures making up the final panorama will have the same exposure level (hence the same brightness/contrast) and the same depth of field. This will make the stitching a lot easier since you will not have to adjust the individual pictures for exposure and focus.
A few extra tips will get you the best results out of this:
Do not use a polarizing filter unless you really have to. When you are going to rotate the camera in order to take the pictures, the incidence of the light on the filter will change and this will result in different colors hues on each picture. This can make the stitching very painful.
Try to use a focal lens of 50mm or greater. This means “zooming in” a little bit. Of course it also means you will have to take more pictures to cover the panorama, but it will result in more details in the end.

Introduction to Panoramic Photography

Pan â € "or panoramic photo â €" is usually made by stitching several images taken with the same device in one. Although you can also get a panoramic effect with a single image, just the aggressive cut â € "especially if you use a wide angle lens â €" I'll stick to a photo œmultiple € € approach in this article because it offers more options.

An overview can be horizontal, vertical or even a mosaic of images taken in both directions. In this article I will assume you want to do a horizontal panorama, which means that the final image will have a width much greater than the height and the photos will be taken from right to left (or left to right, if you prefer, but my camera does so Ine). The technique can, as you will easily adapted to make vertical panoramas.