Ice Ice Baby

After spending the long weekend camping down at Wilsons Prom in Victoria the southern most point on the Australian mainland. I obviously had quite a few photos that I'd taken, so when the girlfriend was home during the week she started putting together an album of the last six months, capped off by some photos from the weekend.

A couple of years ago when shewe decided to put together our first photobook I searched around for ages, we tried BigW but their software was crap and I played around with a couple of others until I settled on Blurb, a US based company that prints to order and delivers pretty quick. The main reason for choosing these guys was that it was well priced, but mainly because their software worked well on our aging laptop and it only required an internet connection when uploading the completed book.

Anyway, back to the whole point of this post. Panoramic shots! More specifically stitching them together from a collection of other photos. As I've often done in the past I'd taken a few collections with the intention of getting them back home and stitching them together. The only thing holding me back (besides chronic procrastination that is) was that I had no idea of which software I should be using. To me the term post processing refers to downloading the photos to the computer. At most I might resize the odd photo so it makes it easier to email. I do intend to rectify this in the future, but it could take a while.

Anyway, I put my feelers out in the usual spot (that is I googled around for a bit, got confused by all the options, then posted on my favourite forum. There was a couple of quick responses but being lazy the single program solution that someone offered seemed like the best (easiest) way to go. The suggestion was for a product from the Microsoft research labs (which if I am not mistaken are also responsible for most of the XP Power tools and such things as ProcessExplorer) The program is called ICE for Image Composite Editor.

So I downloaded it with a little skepticism (it was my fourth pano program of the afternoon) and I was pleasantly surprised. I simply selected the photos I wanted and let it go to work. There where plenty of settings and other things to play with but I just let the program have at it. Even choosing the autocrop option, here are the results.

Pretty damn good I'd say, this is the result of stitching 8 photos taken in portrait with about a 50% overlap between each photo.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share this, if you're looking for a stitching program then I can safely say that ICE is worth a look.

Off to the comedy festival for me now. :)