Panoramas with ICE
Have you ever stood poised with your camera, mesmerised by the sheer majesty of a beautiful skyline stretching out in front of you? And then sighed woefully at the limited wide-angle capabilities of your camera — or most cameras in general — when it comes to capturing the entire width of the viewable horizon? Or maybe, you’ve spontaneously ditched your camera and reached for your phone instead to use its meagre panorama imaging mode to “widen the scope” of your picture?
Creating wide formats
No matter what, even if your regular camera has a panorama mode, there is little chance that it will be able to match the extraordinary prowess of a programme called the Microsoft ICE Panoramic Stitcher (http://is.gd/ cSFoT) in depicting wide spaces. ICE stands for Image Composite Editor here. Now, for those who are still wondering what a panorama image is in the first place… Let’s simply say that that it’s a method of taking photos that allows extended or elongated fields of view. To take a wide format photo that allows you to show sweeping vistas — whether horizontal or vertical, you need to use either some specialised hardware or software. ICE happens to be a software solution — and a totally free one at that.
High resolution results
ICE automatically stitches sequential pictures (from any camera) together to make to make the series look like one vast joint-free ultra wide shot. Unlike a phone’s image that will be rather pathetic in both quality and resolution, ICE is capable of producing high — in fact, your camera’s max output — resolution results in any size. And unlike a phone’s or camera’s inbuilt panorama number-of-shots limitation, ICE allows you to take a virtually unlimited stretch of sequential photos.
Of course, you need to shoot the series of overlapping photographs of a scene pivoting from a single location. Then you must feed the photos to the programme to have them stitched into a single panorama image. The programme automatically blends exposure levels between different frames.
Not a complex programme
ICE is not a complicated programme to understand or use. It can import multiple formats, including JPG, BMP, TIFF, PNG and HD Photo files. And it can export finished panoramas to JPEG, PSD, PNG, TIFF, BMP, HD View and HD Photo formats. You can even publish, view, and share your panoramas on www. photosynth.com.
The application is powerful enough to support “structured panoramas” that can comprise of hundreds of photos taken in a rectangular grid of rows and columns! Though it is engineered to support multi-core CPUs, just remember that the heavier your files and the larger the number of images, the longer the programme will take to process your job.
The writer is a part-time publishing
consultant and a full-time devotee of all things tech. He can be contacted at ashishone@gmail.com
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