The DSLR Field Guide

Stitching Images

Digital photography has made stitching together overlapping frames—to make a significantly larger image—a relatively straightforward technique.

The technique’s most common use is to create panoramas, but there are other applications. Although this is strictly speaking a software matter, it is highly relevant to lens focal length and coverage, because in effect you are creating a wider-angle view.

Also, with this kind of imaging, even though it makes heavy use of software, all of the planning needs to be done at the time of shooting—photography and stitching are separate operations. This is known as planar stitching, and the result is a normal digital image, saved usually as a TIFF or JPEG. A quite different, but very important ...