DVCam High Resolution Photography

Issue 167, for the week of 3/5/2006.

“Copley Square at Night” 1415 x 2559 pixels. 890KB jpeg.

The picture above was stitched together from 108 smaller images using Hugin, a set of open source panorama creation tools. Each slice was captured to tape on a consumer digital camcorder by slowly moving the camera back and forth across the scene from top to bottom at full optical zoom. Once imported and converted to a series of tiffs, the autopano-sift module was run to automatically match neighboring images. Matching points were input by hand in places where the software could not do so. The combined image was exported at full resolution with the edge-smoothing “enblend” module enabled. Cropping and sky completion were performed in Photoshop, and the image shrunk by 50% to eliminate jaggies left over from the camera’s original compression.