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What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Mark Ford
I have a number of digital photographs of maps/drawings of the Dorset County Boundary made around 1845 which I would like to link together to make a continuous strip that could be viewed rather like 'scrubbing' through a bit of music in Garage Band. These maps are hand drawn in notebooks mainly as a single line with short 'spurs' off and with comments nearby. There is an example here.
I would like it to be possible to view it on a Mac & a PC.
Does anyone have an idea how I might accomplish this?
Mark

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Euan Williams
Several pages in a horizontal line is a panorama. Were you to want to rotate them according to the compass direction of each panel the compass-aligned panels would develop into huge area --probably impractical.

The best working Mac-PC format would probably be .png (portable network graphic). These use a loss-less compression algorithm which would avoid any risk of multiple lossy compressions from a succession of .jpg saves post editing. The downside is that .pngs are only RGB compatible.

Some utilities may only work with .jpgs, if so, take care to save only at maximum resolution until the image series is complete. Others could use more exotic formats.

If compression of the final image is needed remember that .tifs (tagged image file format) and .tifcs (compressed tiffs) are written differently for Macs and Pcs which would probably cause confusion. However you choose to do any compression .png would be a good final format, and it would be best not to jump around changing format too often.

Photoshop has excellent tools, while there are a number of less exotic utilities which concentrate on stitching images together, but may result in serious distortions.

You will need the photographs to have been made, so far as possible, from a standard "vertical" point, preferably with a tripod, to avoid perspective distortion -- and leave enough spare space around the important part of the image so that the whole panorama can be cropped neatly as one when it's complete.

(Just one 'take' on your question.)

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Derek Wright
Use Photoshop to create a very wide Panorama and then take that into Pano2VR see
Pano2VR website

This will create a scrollable zoomable image - I have used it for landscape panoramas eg
pano demo 1

and
pano dem 2

once the page has loaded select the icon to maximise the image and then zoom and pan around the image

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Mark Ford
Thank you Euan, that word 'panorama' opened it up for me and as I don't have Photoshop and certainly can't afford to buy it for a small project I downloaded Hugin for free. That seems to meet my need - particularly as I am not so much concerned by the visual outcome as the intellectual possibilities of viewing these maps in sequence.

And Derek, that software looks brilliant - just what I need/hoped for. Your examples are most impressive. I must see how disruptive the watermark is in the trial version!
Thank-you both.

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Euan Williams
Thanks, Derek, for the pointer to, and your results from, Pano2VR, and thanks, Mark for the reference to Hugin. Both apps look like interesting additions to our "virtual library" of recommended utilities. Any more from anyone?

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Mark Ford
Plenty to learn with both of these. I can get Hugin to produce a strip of pictures as I wish but then PanoVR joins them up as a 360 panorama. Is there a way to prevent this Derek? If you are able to tell me it would save an awful lot of hunting through the options - even if I had the vocab for it.
A crude test can be seen here.
PS Euan - how about a photo like the rest of us?

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Derek Wright
I was using Auto Cylinder format and the Flash Output Format
Viewing Parameters used Modify to open the Parameters and then set the Cylindrical Panoram seting to a Horizontal FOV to the angle I want it to cover so use say 150 as a value.

Then Select the gear wheel button and then select a Skin Name of
controller_new.ggsk

and then OK and this should give you what you want -
The view will have the control icons, best to go full screen to be immersed in the view

Just done another one

Arches

After you are in full screen then zoom out - no doubt there is a control to define the initial Zoom factor

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Derek Wright
Thinking more about your problem and having seen the images I do not think that the panorama tool is appropriate. Take each image and crop and straighten each (ie remove perspective error) then take each picture and place alongside its neighbour to create a wide image then adjust the levels to get the image quality you want. Then consider the Pano2VR program.

Re: What software can I use for this? Is there any?

Avatar Mark Ford
Thank you Derek - I have to attend to some other stuff and will return to it later in the week.
 
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