Digital photo stitching for mosaics and panoramas enable the photographer to create photos with higher resolution and/or a wider angle of view than their digital camera or lenses would ordinarily allow—creating more detailed final prints and potentially more dramatic, all-encompassing panoramic perspectives. However, achieving a seamless result is more complicated than just aligning photographs; it also involves correcting for perspective and lens distortion, identifying pixel-perfect matches between subject matter, and properly blending each photo at their seam. This tutorial aims to provide a background on how this process works, along with discussing common obstacles that one may encounter along the way—irrespective of panorama software type.
One of the defining properties of a great photo is that is captures the true essence of a scene and puts the viewer right in the shoes of the photographer. When you’re presented with a vast landscape, sometimes it can be difficult to portray the world around you using a single frame. In order to capture this essence you need your photo to be a depiction of everything you see, so we need to stretch beyond the bounds of a single photo and create a photograph that conveys the whole world around you.
Although panoramic photographs have been taken in sections and pasted together for years, it was the development of digital photography and computer software that made seamless panoramas possible.