s mentioned previously, I’ve been taking a number of fractional images and then having to stitch them together on the computer. I was using a utility that came with my Canon point-n-shoot. Simply put, I have not likes the results. But, given I am frugal (outside of the farmhouse project), I was not about to splurge on one of the nicer professional tools.

I found a solution with YAFMU- yet another free Microsoft utility. It’s called the Microsoft Image Composite Editor (the marketing guys had to work hard to make that name!).

First things first – it works.

To elaborate a bit – it does a rather good job, and given the price point I’d say it does an excellent job. In the example below, I threw 27 fames at it and didn’t both to tell it the layout. ICE took about 4 minutes to work everything out but the results can be seen. The only GIMP (aka the other Photoshop) work I did was to fill in a bit of sky that was missing (because I forgot to take one of the necessary frames) and fix a little parallax error. I should point out that ICE had to work hard to bend the images to line up so the parallax error was not the fault of ICE but rather the natural result of stitching a panning image.

 

WARNING: only click on the image if you have a high speed internet connection as the image is 8470×4494 pixels. I compressed it to 75% but that still leaves a 2.8MB file.