Hey all.. if any of you have looked through my picture gallery u can probably tell I'm an avid fan of panoramic images, just something about being able to see more of what's going on. Well I decided to make a panoramic tutorial, and will be posting it tomorrow. There's one more panoramic I made that just has to be posted tonight :D anyways, if you are eager and don't want to wait you can Check it out here. Hope you all enjoy it and please feel free to e-mail me or private message me if you've benefited from it or have any idea's for improvements. :)

Wow, you have some guys, manually stitching your photos. I think this may have alot of flaws if your dont get your images lined up perfect. As you said using tripods and panorama modes. Or tripods with panning heads.

For a more automatic method of stitching, I reccommend PTAssembler
The software is powerful and free, and unlike other automatic panorama software, this one allows you to vertically and horizontally stitch in the same process. Also adjusts for pinchushion and distortion caused by using incredably wide angles.

They offer a very easy to follow tutorial that took me about an hr to complete and learn the software here

I've had pretty good results with it, alot of the images in my gallery are a composition of 4 images, and I doubt anyone has noticed. Your tutorial is still good tho, I just would never have the patience since sometimes I stitch 4-6 a few times more images at the same time.

Personal examples:

4 images - Early Fall

6 images - Portrait of a Photographer

I use Photostitch, something that came free with my old camera. It doesn't always give a good result, but often I think that is due to the photos more than the software.

I've never actually had stitching software that yielded results that I like no matter how lined up I've gotten my photo's, Haven't tried the ones u guys use. Only takes me 10-15 minutes per panoramic, depending on the photo count.. the next one I'm posting was a 6 image panoramic, so far I've only had to use a tripod during one panoramic, all the one's I've posted however have been freehand framing and haven't really had to rotate any of my images to make them fit nicely. I'll definately have to get those programs and try them out.

Patience and Photoshop are great for making panoramas. Patience being the key technique in this combination, but yields wonderful results.

I dont use a tripod for any of my stitches. So it would be a pain to try and place them together photoshop. Also most stitching software wouldnt place them right either. The unique thing about ptassembler is that it uses control points, as in you tell the software what points in the overlapping pictures are in the same place. With enough control points even a photo that is completely off can be morphed in the software to fit just right :)

Well... after extensively messing around with ptassembler I've decided the panoramic's I do are of better quality than I can get out of ptassembler... though I haven't gone through the tutorial it all seemed fairly self explanatory, I'll post again after I go through the tutorial sometime this week and let ya know if I came up with any better results, but the best I could get the program to come up with wasn't as good (or as fast) as I can do in photoshop