Apple iTunes App Review: AutoStitch

Have you ever been somewhere that was beautiful, but the scene was too large to capture with your iPhone in one photo? Well perhaps this application can help you, I managed to stumble upon it one day and thought I would try it out today. It will help stitch your photos together to help create one large panoramic photograph; AutoStitch by Cloudburst Research.

Stitching on the go!

What does it mean to “stitch” photographs together? In a nut shell, it means to connect multiple photographs together by aligning similar features to help increase the length (or sometimes height) of a scene.

AutoStich allows you to do this easily and effortlessly. Once you have started AutoStich, browse to your Camera Roll on your iPhone and select the photos that make up your panoramic or that you wish to stitch together and hit the Stitch button. After a few moments it will create your stitched image. It shows you the stitching process live too, which is pretty neat. Just make sure to Save your results before you go back or close the application down.

Tip: When you want to make a panoramic, make sure when taking the photos to overlap them by at least 30% on one side, preferably the side in which the direction you move the camera in. I tend to over lap them about 1/4th or even 1/3rd of the photo just to ensure it has enough information and similar references to make a better stitch.

My Thoughts

So far using AutoStitch has worked out pretty well. It was also worth the $1.99 the application costs. It allows me to quickly put together pretty cool looking panoramic scenes without having to load my photos on to my computer first. I can just stitch and show!

There is a bit of duplication in the stitch and I noticed the colours can be a bit off. Though I’m going to blame that on the iPhone’s camera. I never did like the quality of camera Apple decided to include with their $800 phone, but that’s another story.

Here are the few panoramic shots I created using AutoStitch during a walk around Vancouver’s Stanley Park Seawall:

You can click on the photos above to see a larger version. Not bad for an application that only costs $1.99! Don’t forget, I did this all without using a computer. Just my time, a bench to take in the beautiful views and my iPhone. There is some colour issues and some ghosting, but that could be me and my somewhat shaky hands.

Requirements:

• Apple iPhone
• iPhone OS 2.0 or later

I recommend this application to anyone who wish to photograph larger scenes with their Apple iPhone.