This weekend I played with a few free panorama photo stitching programs. In particular, I tested out freeware AutoStitch, freeware GigaPan Stitcher, and open source Hugin (with plugins Panorama Tools, Enblend, and Autopano-SIFT).
In short, AutoStitch was the easiest tool to use and produced panorama/stitched photographs equally as well or better than GigaPan or Hugin. Here are five panorama photographs I produced using AutoStitch and photos I previously captured on my trips to China and Peru.
Chongqing Cruise (stitched from 13 images)
See the full (13158 x 1598) image.
Terra Cotta warriors (stitched from 7 images)
See the full (9980 x 1697) image.
Machu Picchu from Inca Trail (stitched from 17 images)
See the full (11252 x 2894) image.
Machu Picchu a bit closer (stitched from 8 images)
See the full (12613 x 1771) image.
Machu Picchu tree (stitched from 7 images)
See the full (5167 x 2530) image.
Your images look great. Just wanted to point out that the Gigapan Stitcher will do better than many other stitching programs if you’ve got a lot of empty blue sky in your panorama – also, its still in Beta and actively being developed. Not to criticize the others stitcher programs in any way, but I think Gigapan Stitcher is optimized for a slightly different use case than what these particular panoramas illustrate.
You should give Windows Live Photo Gallery a try as well. I think the same guy developed both stitchers, but WLPG is newer.