In a recent blog post I mentioned that a panoramic photo I had added was stitched together in Windows Live Photo Gallery and then cropped and straightened in Picasa.
Who could have imagined that someone from Microsoft would have read the post and shared his thoughts?
“The photo turned out really well,” he wrote. “I'm on the Photo Gallery team and yes, the panorama stitching code does special blending on the sky to help it look better. And Photo Gallery has straighten and crop as well - please give them a try with your next panorama ;-)”
One thing I am addicted to in like about Picasa however is the color tools; I seem to understand how they work better than any others I’ve used. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button just seems to know what to do, and the color enhancement settings can really bring out things that I hadn’t seen before. But I took this commenter's advice to heart, and decided to try a stitch, straighten, crop, and also color with one tool – Windows Live Photo Gallery. My subject, as you see above, was the truck. I took twenty separate shots after work tonight, with my digital camera on a tripod. My goal was to get a bit of “fish eye” effect, mimicking the look of a seriously wide angle photo. Added bonus was a sliver of moon to the right.
In the end I’d say the stitch and edit was a success. I was able to mess with the color and contrast. My digital camera is not the classiest thing in the world, but it’s functional. However, it’s prone to “digital noise” in photos taken after dark. A nice added feature was a noise reducer built into Photo Gallery that smoothed out some of that noise. And the final impressive step to this challenge? I uploaded this blog post, straight from Photo Gallery.
Glad I tried it!
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