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Standing at the top of Primrose Hill, overlooking central London, it has become something of a habit of mine to take lots of photos with a view (aha!) to creating panoramas. I took one quite successfully in the summer, and the snow proved too enticing to miss the opportunity.

I didn’t have a tripod with me, so I knew the stitching wouldn’t be the easiest ever, and was quite worried about the huge crowds milling around at the top of the hill – movement at the edge of a frame doesn’t always go down too well! Anyway, I got home and sorted the rest of my photos first, before moving on to a couple of little projects that would include the panorama.

I’ve only recently decided to give Photoshop CS4 a try – there’s a 30-day free trial from the Adobe site, so I figured it was  worth a go. I normally find Lightroom to be sufficient for my needs, and there’s always the GIMP if I need to do anything more intricate (even if it does have to run under X11 on a Mac).

As for panoramas, I actually have four tools installed at the moment. What follows is an almost standardised comparison of all four. I ran the same images through each programme, on the same hardware, one after the other. I can’t promise it’s a perfect comparison, but it should be fair. Some of the problems could have been helped by making sure all the images were exposed exactly the same, same white balance etc, but where’s the fun in that? Much better to see how they cope with slightly different images.

The gallery below is in the same order I review them in – check the photos first, then read my impressions if you need. (Please be aware the photos are pretty massive!)

 

HP Photosmart Stitch

First up, the one I found the other day is HP Photosmart Stitch. It must have been installed alongside a printer’s myriad different functions, and I didn’t notice it unti the other day when I was creating a panorama for work. It worked ok – there was movement along one seam, which the programme couldn’t really have done anything about, but there was a distinct lack of options. It just asked for the images, and stitched. The only thing you could do is to change the order. (Note: I can’t find a link to an HP page with this to download, and don’t want to link to a random site!)

Plus point: selecting multiple images in Finder and right-clicking (or ctrl-clicking or two-finger tapping, whatever) lets you open directly in this programme, unlike some of the others.

Time: pretty quick.

Canon Photostitch

Then there’s Canon Photostitch. This is also a right-click option for multiple images, but I found that it didn’t load the images in the right order. This may be because I had them arranged irregularly on my desktop, but still – the files are named sequentially, so I don’t see why this happened. I would have expected more from software bundled with my camera, but to be honest I never really expect much from bundled software – I almost never use it. It’s available as a standalone download from the Canon site.

Plus point: automatically suggests a crop before you save, so you get clean edges, and even has an options dialogue, albeit severely limited!

Time: no noticeable difference to HP’s offering, but took a while to save.

Adobe Photoshop CS4

Next up is good old Photoshop. I used the Auto setting on import, to be fair to the others. There aren’t actually that many options, considering Photoshop is considered an industry workhorse. I would have thought it would be more comprehensive, but never mind. The only thing I noted is that it took quite a while to complete, at least on my laptop, and the results aren’t that much better than the previous two. It’s not blended as well as I’d have hoped from software that costs a bomb (thank $deity it’s the trial version!), but I suppose it does offer you quite a lot of options immediately after – it’s preloaded into Photoshop, after all.

Plus point: nothing spectacular that I can really think of, to be honest.

Time: a fair while.

Hugin aligning images

Hugin, however, well. There’s a real beauty right there. Load up your images, and autopano-c can will align them. There are myriad options (perhaps too many – but for this run, I just let the defaults/auto choose everything for me), including the ability to align manually. Exposure blending is so much better in Hugin than any of the others, and it’s free. Free in a lot of senses. The gallery of panoramas should speak for themselves, really. Hugin is my favourite. I’ve had problems using it before, but those are a resut of my dodgy camera abilities more than the software.

Plus point: the best exposure blending, it’s free, fairly speedy, options if you want them, automatic if you don’t…

Time: neither the slowest nor the quickest, but can take a while.

I was first introduced to Hugin by Lifehacker a while back, but this is the first time I’ve bothered to do a real comparison. Seeing the results, it was obviously a bit of a waste of time…!