If you haven't tried creating a panorama using the panoramic stitch feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery, you should. What this feature does with a series of photos is nothing short of amazing.

The panoramic feature in Photo Gallery “stitches” together a series of photos to create a large composite. To do this, Photo Gallery looks for similar patterns in a series of photos that appear to match up, and combines them. Most of the time you can predict what the resulting stitch will look like, however occasionally you’re rewarded with something unexpected, surreal and sometimes oddly beautiful.

I really like how Photo Gallery distorts and mangles pixels to make a panorama. Photo Gallery doesn’t know or care how the finished photo will look, it just connects the photos the best it can based on its internal algorithm. Because a photographer’s vantage point is never perfectly aligned with each photo in a series, Photo Gallery has to curve lines and create gradations to join up elements in each photo.

This panoramic gives Amsterdam an even more woozy quality.

Notice how the transitions between sky and water aren’t perfect and the odd curved quality of the composite? This is because of the slightly different vantage point, lighting and shutter speed my camera used for each shot in the series.

My photographic style involves leaving my camera on “automatic” and quickly taking more photos than I ever plan to keep. I’m more interested in capturing a moment, the point of view and in the composition of a photo than fiddling with shutter speed, lenses and other technical stuff. This means I end up throwing a lot of photos away. Probably more than I keep. I still end up with tons of photos and some pretty interesting ones that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Using Photo Gallery’s tagging and organizational features makes sorting the ones worth keeping pretty quick and easy.

Horizons and perspective

When stitching together photos, Photo Gallery looks for patterns to connect. Those patterns don’t have to be aligned across a horizon. Try taking a grouping of photos vertically as well as horizontally. If there is enough overlap between the photos, Photo Gallery will connect them. Take a look at this example of 12 horizontal and vertical photos I’ve stitched together:

Don’t try using this fire escape in a hurry.

A wide angle lens effect

As interesting as it is to join dozens of photos together to create a panorama, consider connecting just a few to create the illusion of a wide angle lens. Here are a few photos of my dogs in the Redwood National Park. Notice how the first photo in the series doesn’t include the dogs? That’s because I (sorta) used the rule of thirds in composing it.

Now those same photos stitched together and cleaned up with a little cropping:

Ah, isn’t that the sweetest?

Photo Gallery generally recognizes and eliminates redundant things in photos and eliminates them.

Fake out Photo Gallery

Another interesting experiment is to fool Photo Gallery into creating scenes that don't really exist. Here’s a panorama I created by stitching together a couple separate panoramas and including a third photo afterward:

Looks a little like a 70’s department store portrait, huh?

Here are the composites I stitched together to get this weirdness:

If you get an error that says Photo Gallery can’t stitch together your photos because they don’t match closely enough, don’t give up. Sometimes you can correct the problem with careful cropping, or a slight contrast, exposure, or color adjustment. Start with a small selection of the photos that you intend to stitch together, and work your way up until you isolate the issue.

Sometimes things go pleasantly wrong

Sometimes Photo Gallery gives up trying to stitch together photos and returns an error, other times it bungles the job in pretty terrific ways. In this panoramic stitch of my living room, Photo Gallery recognizes that these photos belong together, but it can’t figure out how. Its algorithm doesn't seem to account for gravity.

Behold. A room that Dali would approve of.

No matter how you use Photo Gallery, it's got lots of features that you can use to make your photos look better — or at least more interesting. Because taking digital photos is essentially free, and editing photos in Photo Gallery is risk-free (you can always revert back to the original, even after you save changes), I take tons more photos and have more fun experimenting and being creative with them. If I don't like the way a photo turns out, I either undo my changes and try again, or if the photo doesn't continue to hold my interest, I just throw it away.

Check out this fun video showing how easy it is to create a panoramic stitch.

- Brad Wright
  The Windows Live team

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