A Wide Experiment

I’m putting a poster together to take to the Society for the Study of Evolution meeting next weekend, and the recommended facility for printing is the MSU library. It turns out they have an HP 4500PS wide-format inkjet printer that prints stuff on 36″ wide rolls of paper. And they charge $6.00 per linear foot, or $2.00 per square foot. That’s a fifth the cost that Kinko’s quoted me.

So I plan to take more than just the poster file with me. I figure I’ll get a couple of other things printed up large.

Diane requested a panorama I did for her back when we lived in San Diego. I went down to Shelter Island and took pictures of the harbor using my trusty 24mm f/2.8 Nikkor. I originally used the Canon PhotoStitch application for putting the pictures together, and it worked out OK. But last night I dug up the originals and put them into the Hugin application. I had some difficulty because I hadn’t gotten the idea that one should overlap about a third to a half from image to image; my panorama shots overlapped just small parts of edges. That meant the Autopano-SIFT function did not find control points automatically on several image pairs, and I had to add those myself. But once I did that, the application put together an 11784×2853 pixel image for me. The Enblend part of Hugin has it all over the PhotoStitch program for making visually seamless joins.

First, the PhotoStitch version:

Now, the Hugin version:

That is perhaps not completely fair, because the Hugin and PhotoStitch versions are based on different sequences of photos. I hadn’t realized that when putting the Hugin version together. In any case, I’m planning on splitting the Hugin version in two, and printing both at about 18″ high so as to reduce the linear foot charge. I’ll have one physical join to make between the two images from the printout.