The photo magazine ‘Chasseurs d’Images‘ of October 2008 (issue #307) propose an article about the photography of monuments. The aim of the article is to show that it is possible to give a personnal touch to a photograph of a monument, even for famous monuments that have been shot thousands of times.

It’s all about creativity and technical mastering. The image stitching technique is presented as a very interesting option to depict the best way the spirit of the monument in its context.

Two photos of Joël Juge, an addicted Autopano Pro user, were published in this article. The first one is what we call a “little planet” that he shot in Roma (Italy). The second one was shot in Burgos (Spain) and contains 15 individual images stitched in Autopano Pro. This use of Autopano Pro simulates a very wide angle, without getting the distortions of such lenses.

Congratulations to Joël for these beautiful stitchings. His website contains a lot more: http://joeljuge.free.fr/

For the first time, Kolor stitched videos together, using Autopano Server. As for static image stitching, the technologies available in Autopano were applied to video stitching. This creates a color-corrected final video with invisible seems between source videos.

The whole process is automatic; the only manual step is the video synchronization at the beginning of the stitching.

The projection mode is determined once for the whole sequence whereas the color correction adapts in real time.

For this experiment, 3 different SD camcorders were placed on a same rod and auto-stabilization was disabled. To minimize parallax errors, the subject should not be too close to the camcorders.

Smartblend ghost-remover can be improved, using temporal information.

The result obtained with this simple hardware enables to imagine very good results if using professional sequences (greater video resolution, accurate synchronization, global stabilization…).

The 3 individual video sources and the final assembled video:

More than 240 Autopano Pro users sent us 1600 images for the Panorama Book project: a great success!

As previously announced, each contributor will have at least one of his panoramas published in the book. We selected 360 images indeed.

The next steps :
- In september, our graphic designer will receive all the selected images and create the book layout
- In October, 4000 copies of the book will be printed
- In November, we will receive the books and will add them to our online store. All contributors will be able to buy the book at cost price.

Special thanks to all the contributors; this will be a great book with awesome panoramas!