410 CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING (Multiple domain web hosting) Figure 10-36.
410 CHAPTER 10 ADVANCED COMPOSITING Figure 10-36. An old-style panorama, before GIMP Combining several images into a panorama is called stitching. The process is straightforward, but it includes several steps, and requires some patience to get a result that looks truly seamless. Let s take it one step at a time. Shooting the Images Perhaps you already have a collection of images you d like to stitch together. If not, here are some handy tips for taking a panoramic series. Some people find this stage the most intimidating part of the process. It s really not a problem if you follow a few guidelines. Overlap Photos for Panoramas Overlap quite a bit. At first, you might be tempted to put the left edge of image 2 right where the right edge of image 1 was. There are two problems with that. First, camera lenses (especially wide-angle lenses) distort the image (a phenomenon known as lens warp). The distortion is especially pronounced at the edges. If you use a lot of overlap, you ll be using mostly the centers of each frame where there isn t so much distortion. Second, a lot of overlap means that if one image turns out to be bad, you can discard it and still make a usable panorama from the remaining images. Overlap at least a third of each image (as in Figure 10-36), but more is better, especially if you re using a digital camera: bits are cheap. Keep the Horizon Level Keep the camera level: don t tilt it between shots. If you have a tripod, or a flat surface like a picnic table, that makes it easy. If you have to hold the camera by hand (and let s face it, most of the time when you see a spectacular vista worthy of a panoramic shot, you probably won t have your tripod with you), try standing in a stable position and twisting your body as you take each shot. Pay attention to the horizon in the camera s viewfinder: try to keep it parallel to the top and bottom of the frame. If you accidentally tilt the camera, you can use GIMP s Rotate tool to make it level after the fact. However, rotating images so that they all match well enough to make
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