Photoshop question

thatmguy

thatmguy

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Mar 26, 2000
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I need to stitch together a few hundred pictures.

Do I need the full blown package of Photoshop, or can I get away with the "Elements" package???

Any help would be appreciated.

Mike
 
By stitching you mean creating a panorama (or just really hi-res image) or just putting them together?
For the latter you can easily use e.g. free Irfanview.

If it's the first case - how big are these images? PS is really resources-hungry and you might be better off with something like Panotools and PTAssembler or PTGUI, or if you want to go "pro" give a try to Realviz Stitcher.
 
"elements" is a great tool and will probably have all the features you'll need to make great pictures. adobe specifically made it to tailor to people who only need specific features for amatuer/professional photography but don't want to blow >600.00 on full photoshop.
 
I need to take pictures of a dataroom underfloor and put them together to get a view without the floor tiles in place that will show areas of congestion and freespace.

I will be taking pictures of areas 2' x 4", then stitching them together.

The total square footage is around 9000 ft sq.

Most likely, I will break it down into managable sections.

Thanks.
 
9000 square feet is cca 836 square meters. 2'x4" is approx 0.06 sq m. So you will need approximately 14 000 images to picture specified area. That's really for very long... Good luck.
 
Crap, 2 foot x 4 foot pics.

Just over about 1K pics.

It will be an undertaking.:eek:
 
I don't know if elements can do it, but the function in photoshop to stitch things together is called Photomerge. Maybe you can look it up somewhere. It can be a beast to use with lots of high-res photos, so given the size of your task, you might want to keep that in mind.

Good luck.
 
Elements will do it. Do you actually need to 'stitch' and blend it, or would side-by-side images work? Sure would be a LOT easier. Like a checkerboard.

If you don't plan on printing it, it would be even more manageable. The size of the files necessary to print would bog you down enormously. If you 'simply' pasted 640x480 images onto a bare white background image it might work.

1000 640x480 images x 50kb ea = 50mb. Ugghh. The PSD file would be that much larger, more like 150MB.

Coop
 
For stitching I highly recommend using PTGui, which was one of huugh's suggestions. I've used a number of stitching programs and PTGui was the last one I ever bothered trying: it works great for me and gives better results than I had previously been able to achieve.

I would suggest you get a trial of it, and maybe of some other stitching programs that you want to try, and then experiment on a small scale. You will get a feeling for how much overlap you need between images. Your calculations above assume no overlap between images, which will not work well (if at all) in just about any program.

My best results in stitching have always come from generous overlaps with a lot of frames. Whereas I used to shoot a panorama consisting of three images, I'll now cover that same hypothetical width with six to nine images. At times it is overkill, but I've never hurt a stitch with too many images: after all, intermediate frames can always be left out if needed. For the scale you are talking about, however, this becomes an absolute nightmare.

Problems also become apparent when you try to work out exposure settings: leaving the camera on auto will result in an ugly stitch on most small scales, much less something that large. But I doubt you can find one happy medium of manual settings that will cover that whole area, so for best results you will have to gradually shift your exposure/WB settings over the terrain of your subject matter.

If you can pull this off, more power to you!
It's not something I would even start to consider on your described scale, but maybe I just don't have the patience. Good luck!
 
Agreed that a checkerboard setup will be much more manageable. It will also not require overlap and is achievable in just about any program, including GIMP (as mentioned by DeanS). I love GIMP for use on other computers besides my home unit. It's completely free and offers functionality that stands up incredibly well to Photoshop for casual users (or even experienced, but non-professional users).

(If you go the checkerboard with no overlap route, however, make sure your images are well labeled or ordered so they are easy to piece together. Nothing would be more frustrating than taking tons of images and then not being sure how to put them together.)
 
I could do that manualy in photoshop elements. First create a blank image the size of the intended finished product and then paste your images in, layering them on top of each other and lining up the edges with a slight overlap, then using the eraser tool to slighty remove the edge of the top photo to create as seamless blend as possible. Once finished flatten the whole thing back into a single jpeg.

I said I could do it - but I'm not sure my PC could. The working file created by photoshop (.PSD) would be huge. Most collages I create with 20 -30 jpeg images can create a .PSD file of 100mb or more. It becomes very cumbersome.
 
The plan is to take pics, recording each shot on a grid, then renaming each pic to the appropriate grid location.

Will be a big task, but somehow will get it done.
 
Well I don't know if you are a programmer or not, but depending on your needs I could see an advantage to making a web application out of this. Instead of stitching, you could have a web page that tiles a bunch of thumbnails of your larger pictures together into a grid. Click to zoom on a specific picture.
 
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