Few months ago, I watched an advertisement of a Kodak digital camera which involved famous pop singer Taylor Swift. She comes up and takes a panorama shot of all her fans and the digital camera automatically creates a panorama image. But not all cameras have this special feature. If you also do not have a camera with the ability of creating panorama images, then you can use the free Hugin software to stitch together many photographs into a single panorama image.
Hugin is anopen-source panorama photo stitching and HDR (high dynamic image ranging) merging program developed by Pablo d’Angelo and others. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch’s Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal’s Enblend and Enfuse. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image. Hugin allows for the easy (optionally automatic) creation of control points between two images, optimization of the image transforms along with a preview window so the user can see whether the panorama is acceptable. Once the preview is correct, the panorama can be fully stitched, transformed and saved in a standard image format.
The tabbed interface of Hugin walks you through the various steps of creating a panorama photo : selecting the photos, specifying differences in the lenses, setting up control points (corresponding locations on pairs of photos), optimizing, and then stitching. At most steps in the process you can make fine manual adjustments or let the program work automatically.
So if you want to stitch your photographs into a panorama picture, then give Hugin a try. Hugin is open-source freeware and works on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download Hugin from http://hugin.sourceforge.net/download/.