Panoramas

Turns out that creating quite impressive panoramas (or rather, impressive for a newbie like me) isn’t hard at all! A camera that has panorama-assist feature or a tripod are useful, but they’re not required. Once you have the pictures (better to take too many than too few), try Hugin (open-source panorama photo stitcher). Most of the times it does everything automatically, but sometimes you’ll have to match points across pictures by hand.

The problem with the resulting image will be the (sometimes large, depends on the photographer’s skill :) areas with no data. Fortunately, there’s a solution to that. It’s a Gimp plugin that can recreate an area of the picture based on the surrounding pixels only. It it works great in this case. Sure, it’s not always perfect and you can get the occasional floating mountain in the middle of the sky, but you can usually fix it quickly by doing same operation on a smaller selection. This amazing plugin is called resynthesizer, and the easiest way to install it is from Ubuntu’s repository.

Some samples now.

Sinaia, at 2000m altitude.

Bucharest, near Titan.