Cambridge, Charles River (also: free photomerge software)

Cambridge, Charles River
Originally uploaded by mehampson

This image was made from seven photos taken on a bridge over the Charles River, in Harvard Square. The night before had seen strong, warm rains, and a cooler front was moving in, causing high, thin clouds and choppy water.

I made two copies of this, in Photoshop CS4 and in the open-source Hugin. Both of them struggled a bit, since I was using the wide end of the 28-105mm f/3.5-f/4.5 USM II zoom lens — there’s a bit of distortion in each shot that they had to account for, but both did a pretty good job in the end. Flipping between the two merged panoramas, I don’t see a great difference between them. This image is from CS4, because it happened to be in exact 3×5 proportions and didn’t need any further cropping; otherwise it would have been a coin toss which to upload.

And I also made a copy in Canon’s Photostitch. The interface was so simplistic and the results were so bad (it laid out each of the seven photos next to each other in a fan shape and blended the edges, with no overlapping or exposure blending at all) that I couldn’t see ever using it for any serious work. Useless. I uninstalled it.

I’m only using CS4 as trial; it’s a bit easier to use for panos than Hugin is, but Hugin isn’t hard. I know how silly it is to not post the Hugin image alongside for comparisons, but the images are big, and frankly look basically the same; at any rate, Hugin is open-source and free, so I’d say just download it and give it a try.