Filed under: iPhone, App Store, App Review
AutoStitch raises the bar on iPhone panoramas
There are quite a few programs that allow you to create panoramas on the iPhone. I've reviewed some of them, and they all get pretty good reviews. The differences are often in how much work you have to do versus letting the software do the alignments of the various images. Since iPhone photos are almost always hand held, there are going to be issues of the camera not always being level.AutoStitch [App Store] is a US$1.99 app that gets most of the process just right. When you run it, it asks you to import images from your camera roll, as many as you like. They can be horizontal for a wide panorama, or stacked vertically. As an experiment I shot both vertically and horizontally, and rocked the camera significantly out of level by tilting it up to about 45 degrees. I took 10 images, and the software assembled the images in the proper order. There were a couple of gaps, where there was no image, but that was my fault, not the application's. The result was pretty impressive: not as a great image, but that AutoStitch could make sense out of the jumble of shots. You can see this image in the gallery I've created.
No panorama software I've seen is perfect. When I look closely at the full resolution images I see a bit of ghosting in the distant mountains, but overall AutoStitch is an excellent program that lets you take the pictures while it does the work. All panoramas need some cropping cleanup, and iPhoto can do this when you import from the camera. If you want to do all the post-processing on the iPhone itself, I suggest Photogene, [App Store] which will straighten and crop your photos, plus lots of other functions if you want them. It's a great US$2.99 investment. I'll be reviewing this app in a future post.
Here are some sample panos taken assembled with AutoStitcher. I've reduced the size of these images so they will load faster. You can find more on the developer's web site.
Image Examples:
Gallery: AutoStitcher
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
kristin said 5:32PM on 6-12-2009
Maybe you're just talking iPhone pano software, but it's not the software that's not perfect, it's the person shooting them that's not perfect. Using a real camera and a pano-head on the tripod and you can get perfect panos. I shoot 100+ megapixel panos and you can zoom in as much as you want and you won't see any errors.
Then again, if you're just talking iPhone apps, then ignore the above...
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Joshua Ochs said 6:01PM on 6-12-2009
Yes. He's talking iPhone apps, snapped while being held in your hand. *As he said in the article you didn't read.*
I'll be happy to ignore what you said.
PSTMD said 7:01PM on 6-12-2009
Will the software allow you the add more photos to an image - to fill in the blank spots?
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malte said 8:05PM on 6-12-2009
is this finally taking pictures or stitching pictures with the full 2mpixels (for each picture)? looked at the dev-site an the pics are really not that impressing (compared to pano and panorama)...
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John B. said 8:13PM on 6-12-2009
Pics on the developer's site look pretty good to me. I think if you used it you'd probably appreciate it more. Pano works great as long as you don't leave their walled garden. This app appears to be more robust and give you more freedom.
mrobin604 said 11:25PM on 6-12-2009
OK, I downloaded this thing, and the panos it generates are smaller than the original images put together. Is there a max size on the panos?
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Gordon Anderson said 12:42AM on 6-13-2009
It stitched 25 photos of my patio rendering pano no problem. Straigntened and cropped in iPhoto. Done after dusk so grainy. I'm impressed.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andergm/3621463122/
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required said 12:26PM on 6-13-2009
nice!
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Josh Wardell said 1:37PM on 6-13-2009
I snagged it, forever holding out with the inferior apps. It works almost perfectly. I want it not so much for panos but to combine a few shots to get a wider angle photo, essentially giving your iphone a wide angle lens. (for non-moving subjects of course)
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shaunisadirty said 3:48PM on 6-13-2009
With a crappy camera, no matter which version iPhone you have, including the 3Gs. Just another crappy app to add to the list of 50,000
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Brad Knowles said 7:28PM on 6-13-2009
The initial version of AutoStitch had some problems with vertical panoramas (witness http://gallery.me.com/bradknowles#100024/IMG_0051&bgcolor=black and http://gallery.me.com/bradknowles#100024/IMG_0053&bgcolor=black ), but I contacted the developers and they were extremely responsive.
This issue is now fixed in version 1.0.0.2, which should be on the iPhone App store soon.
This app is not like Pano or Panorama, both of which force you to use their program to take photos, and help you get the alignment correct for each successive picture in the sequence. This program lets you pick whatever photos you want from your existing library, in whatever order you want, then does the automatic exposure correction, feature extraction, sub-pixel alignment, and then stitching and blending to the final render. You pick the photos, and everything else is automatic from there -- unlike some other panorama stitching programs on the App Store which force you to take each photo, place it on a grid and try to get it aligned manually, etc....
The developers have a lot of good things planned for this program, so keep your eyes peeled. What they have today is already operating at the level of a four-star program, and it's only going to get better from here. They currently rival what you can get with many desktop stitching programs, and I've produced worse panoramas with expensive "professional" stitching programs costing hundreds of dollars. This is a much less expensive program, operating on a device that has much less memory and much slower CPU, and yet it's already doing quite credible panoramas quite quickly with a large number of input pictures.
If you want to take a look at some of the other examples, including examining the source photos as well as the final output, see my gallery at http://gallery.me.com/bradknowles#100024&view=grid&bgcolor=black&sel=9 . The only panorama in this group which was done with any other program is IMG_0052, which was done with "Panorama Pro", and taking pictures very similar to IMG_48, IMG_49, and IMG_50. In contrast, IMG_0084 is what AutoStitch 1.0.0.2 automatically produced, when taking those same three pictures as input.
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Ed said 8:16PM on 6-13-2009
I've used the free autostitch (from http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html) - it runs on OS X via Wine/Crossover a lot over the years, and I've used Autopano Pro (which uses autostitch), and the panoramas are impressive. I've done some panoramas with 300+ images (= quite a few gigapixels) and theyv'e come out great. I doubt the iPhone can cope with such large images, but I may well get this and have a go!
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