Normalize my photos!

May 20, 2009 4:22 PM

Is there any software that will allow me to get a series of photos (taken from roughly the same vantage point) to "match"?

I have a set of photos that I want to turn into a timelapse slideshow. The problem is, the perspectives/angles are almost but not quite identical. I'm looking for some software (preferably for a Mac) that will allow me to get all the photos lined up properly.

Ideally, I'd like to find something akin to a photo stitching program, that would match features on each photo to map them automatically. I suspect that this would be more difficult here than in a panorama, since the lighting on the features is different across the photos.

Second best would be something that allows me to define the features myself, and performs transformations from there. Years ago I recall playing with several photo morphing programs that had this sort of interface -- ie. define a set of matching control points on each photo, and map a set of transformations from them.

Third best would be something that allows me to superimpose one photo on another, and move/scale/skew it in place.

The second and third options seem like they could be fairly trivial Core Image applications, so this may be verging into mere laziness on my part.

Also, most of these images are standard (~6mp) photos, but some are panoramas (20-30mp). For this purpose, though, I wouldn't need to be working with the full-size images.

posted by bjrubble to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You could try Photomerge, which is built-in to Photoshop (at least in CS4). It's under File->Automate. It works fairly well in certain circumstances, but I haven't tried it for doing something like you want to create. Worth a shot before you go hunting for something specialized though.
posted by zachlipton at 4:31 PM on May 20

Photosynth has that "3D photostitch" capability but I don't know if you can make slideshows from it.
posted by junesix at 4:37 PM on May 20

You just need to use one of the automatic panorama stitching tools, and have it make the final output a series of images instead of merging them. Then it's a simple matter of converting a series of images into a single AVI file. There will be gaps around the edges of the final output, so you'll probably want to crop it as well.

For panorama stitching, Autopano Pro is amazing, but a little pricey if it's just a one off thing.
posted by davr at 5:20 PM on May 20

AutoStitch is awesome, but haven't used it in awhile. It's demoware that sometimes expires.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:09 PM on May 20

Hugin is a fantastic piece of software (or, more accurately, front-end to a package of tools) that could probably do this. It could certainly do your second-best option (using user-defined control points), and it may actually be able to line things up automatically. It's a very versatile tool, so I'm not totally familiar with all its tricks, but the documentation is decent and getting better.
posted by hatta at 8:26 PM on May 20

AutoStitch never expired for me when I was using it on Windows.

Hugin is awesome and almost always does the whole thing automatically. 80% of the time it Just Works, 15% of the time I have to mess with the perspective slider to un-contort the image, and 5% of the time I have to actually pick control points.

But that's just panorama software. It doesn't do what Photosynth does.

Note that Photosynth requires Silverlight, which is Microsoft's Flash competitor and scary to some folks.
posted by intermod at 9:55 PM on May 20

I tried some of the recommended solutions, couldn't get any of them to do what I wanted.

Finally I realized that I'd been trying out a slew of vector illustration programs for another project, and that these might fit the bill really well. So I loaded up DrawIt, dragged and dropped a couple of images, and it is exactly what I envisioned as option #3.

Drop an image, and it creates a new layer. Vary the transparency, and you can see it superimposed on an earlier layer. Move it, scale it, rotate it. Save a file containing all the aligned stacked images for further tweaking. And DrawIt has a feature called Slices that lets you define a window and repeatedly export the contents, so you can export a series of bitmaps all tied to the same viewport.

It would be nice to have some scripting or shortcuts for some of the features, and DrawIt hasn't been the most stable program I've ever used, but in just a few minutes I was able to generate a near-perfect timelapse sequence.
posted by bjrubble at 12:02 AM on May 21

If you want to manually align similar images, with a semi-automatic assist, view the two images in photoshop as a %50 overlay. Negate one of the images. Now you will see a predominantly flat gray image with some wispy image artifacts. As you slide one image relative to another, the closer to a flat gray field that you see will be the best alignment.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:46 PM on May 21