Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

6.2. Stage 2

6.2.1. Preparing and loading the files

I loaded the source files into iView MediaPro, a media management program, to sort the photos. I had to shoot each picture several times, and often out of sequence, because whenever a car drove by, its headlights swept across the scene, ruining my shot.

Once I had chosen a set of pictures, I copied the files, arranged them in montage order from left to right in a new folder, and renamed them so they would appear in the proper sequence for Stitcher.

To get a quick preview of the assembly, I started by working with the 8 MB JPEG pictures that my camera produces at the same time as the 32 MB RAW files. I saved them in TIFF format since I would probably have to modify them a few times. (JPEGs degrade after being saved repeatedly.)

In the photos at each end of the series, the sky looked much darker than in the middle shots. That's because the narrow building in the center was due west of my shooting position, and I was taking pictures at 7:55 in the evening. It would be interesting to see how Stitcher managed to balance the gaps before I had to intervene with Photoshop.

One of Stitcher's strong points is its ability to equalize

discrepancies in brightness and color between pictures.

I closed Photoshop to free up memory and then launched Stitcher, giving it 80% of available RAM—about 750 MB.

I then moved the images directly from iView into Stitcher, where they appeared in the Image Strip window. I started the assembly by dragging ...