[Liz]

I am doing a panorama with Photostitch, but I notice that when the photo is stitched together, I can see the seams. They are very light, but I can see them. Sometimes the panoramas are beautiful, but when you can see the seams there is no point in printing the photo. I am using photos and when the size is shown for the panorama, I have no clue what the actual printout size would be. The picture is huge 4791x1989 so I cut it in half to 2396x995. I don't know what the size is in relationship to picture terms ex: 8"x12". I'm new to this and playing, but I would like to do a panoram with no visible seams and I would also like to know the actual size of the picture in inches. Thank you...Liz

[slipe]

Hi Liz. You have a couple of issues.

Your size in pixels has nothing to do with your print size. If you send the printer more pixels than it can use there is no quality loss when the print spooler takes all the pixels it can use and rejects the excess. It is a better approach than sending it too few pixels.

Your panorama is in the wrong width to height ratio to print an 8 X 12. Your panorama would print 8 X 19.27. If you want any other size you have to crop it first to the right ratio. If you tell us what image editors you have someone can give you instructions for getting the print cropped and the print size set without losing any more pixels than necessary.

The lines are caused by the camera using a different exposure and/or white balance between shots. If you are using panorama mode on the camera I am a little disappointed to hear that Canon doesn’t fix the parameters with the first shot. I had thought only Pentax doesn’t know how to make a panorama mode.

Autostitch will stitch them without lines. The demo is odd. It is full featured but expires after a month. Unless they have changed it you can just uninstall it next time you need stitching and install a new download. http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Newer versions of Photoshop and I assume Elements will also even out stitch lines. I find it a little frustrating as I usually shoot panoramas with a fixed exposure and WB. Photoshop doesn’t do as clean a stitch as I would like because it attempts to even out what doesn’t need it.

[Liz]

Thank you for your reply. I was not aware that I had the panorama option on my camera. After receiving your reply to my post, I digged out my camera book and sure enough I found the instructions on how to shoot panorama in segments. I haven't had the opportunity to get a good panorama shoot and try the photostitch to see of the seams show, but I'm pretty sure they won't and my problem is solved. Thank you again.