mosaic making software

[ColHut (Colin)]

Just sharing. For freeware mosaic stitching software:

The best I have found so far for simplicity and ability is Microsoft ICE - It can take a while but it works and exports and imports in tiff, bitmaps etc.

The next best was autostitch demo version

after that...

Hugin seemed to need me to do the work and I gave up.
imerge worked well if there was no rotation
IRIS was command line based and I honestly gave up
POS panarama pro didn't cope
Stellar Magic didn't work for me
Andrea Mosaic was a no go.

I may have links if that would be helpful

regards

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

AutoStitch is pretty much where it all began
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Quote "The version of AutoStitch on this website is a demo only. Individuals or companies are free to use images that they generate using the demo version of AutoStitch without restriction or royalties so long as they acknowledge the use of AutoStitch in such works. A commercial license to AutoStitch provides access to the patent, source code, technical support and updates."

Autopano Pro is amazing, but it is 99 Euros
http://www.autopano.net/
With out registering it works, but puts a watermark on the output image.
Just make sure you have the focal length right in the images you feed it, or force override to the correct value (e.g C8+f6.3 reducer 2032*0.63=1280mm)

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

ditto on autostitch. brilliant bit of freeware.

[troypiggo (Troy)]

I've only ever used it for terrestrial panos, not astro mosaics, but hugin is pretty darn good and free. It does a great job of aligning, and it has a basic click 1-2-3 process to get you started, or you can step in and control it much more specifically if you want/need.