Friday, May 29, 2009

New Site Header

Hey there!

I just updated the header for the site so if you normally read this with a feed reader you should drop by the site and check it out.

It was Julie's (my wife) due date yesterday, when this photo was taken. We went for a walk to see if we could get things moving. No luck yet.

This is actually three photos stitched together to make a panoramic. I used Microsoft ICE to do the stitching. I normally try to stay away from Micro$oft as much as I can, let along endorse it, for reasons I won't get into here, but this is a pretty amazing tool, and it's free! Simply open it up and drag in all the photos you want to stitch together. It does the rest. It figures out what order they should be in, lines them up, and corrects some of the lighting/color issues there might be so that they blend together nicely. It takes it's good old time, but still faster then doing it manually. Sometimes it doesn't include all of the photos you selected in the final image, but often if you try again it will work. When taking the photos that you plan to stitch later, try to make sure that they overlap by about a third.

4 comments:

  1. Yep, I like it, Joel. Great shot and stitching, too. Nice.

    Maybe more of a gentle transition from your name overlay to the piccy on the lhs? Just my opinion ;)

    Cheers,
    --Mark

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  2. Nice photo. I thought I recognized the extra-wide field of view.

    Have you tried hugin as your photo stitcher?

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  3. I'm trying Hugin now. It looks pretty good. A lot more options to choose from, it'll take a little while to get use to.

    My OS is Linux, MS ICE only works in windows, so it'll be nice to not have to start up a windows virtual machine just to stitch an image.

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  4. Yeah, virtual machines are virtually a big headache.

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