How do I line up a bunch of images?

July 1, 2008 12:34 AM

I am trying to find some sort of image alignment software that would line up a series of similar photographs.

I have seen animations made of things such as faces / streets over a large sequence of photos where the main details of the image don't change much. However when I have made some basic attempts to duplicate this, the images don't line up very well and the animation looks jumpy.

While I can set up a template and manually line up details such as eyes, nose, chin etc, this is painfully slow. I was wondering if there is software which would take a series of images with details in common and crop / rotate / zoom them to make important details line up.

So, in essence, a program into which I would feed a number of similar photos, say, portraits. It would pick out the similar details on each picture - eyes, mouth, nose - and make the pictures line up so that an animation would look more smooth. This would preferably be for XP.

posted by tomble to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Any compositing software should let you do stabalization tracking. You should be able to import the images as a series of frames & stabalize those. I've done it with Shake & Digital Fusion.. I think DF has a free version, but I think it also watermarks output. It may not watermark the frames on the screen though, and for stills, you could probably take screencaps.
posted by devilsbrigade at 12:45 AM on July 1

I use this in PhotoShop all the time. Import all the images in to one file (as layers). Select all layers and use Edit-->Auto Align. This also works to make panoramic photos out of a series of images if you then use the Edit-->Auto Blend feature.
posted by rinosaur at 5:13 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Does anyone know if Photoshop Elements (or something else that's cheaper than Photoshop_ does auto-align?
posted by lukemeister at 10:52 AM on July 1

Does anyone know if Photoshop Elements (or something else that's cheaper than Photoshop_ does auto-align?

I doubt it. My poor Photoshop 7 doesn't even do it (I presume, rinosaur, that you're using Photoshop CS?). Furthermore, I really doubt that even then it will rotate and resize images to make them match up. That sounds extremely sophisticated (at least the automatic resizing bit does), kind of like the software used for facial recognition. I've heard of some (extremely expensive) software that tackles alignment issues in biology (see, for example, Autoaligner), but even then I'm not sure if it would easily do what you're asking.

As far as cheap options go, I have recommended Imagej (which is free) before. According to this site, there's a plugin that will do alignment (MECombine), but I can't actually find the download. Perhaps it has a different name on the Imagej plugin index.
posted by kisch mokusch at 2:32 PM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Aha! Found it! StackReg (and TurboReg) plugins for imagej (link has a cool example). It won't resize by the looks of it, but it will rotate images.
posted by kisch mokusch at 3:50 PM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Bravo, Kisch! I downloaded Imagej and the plugins, and it is absolutely perfect!
posted by tomble at 6:09 PM on July 1

Glad to be of assistance :-) I love that program.
posted by kisch mokusch at 4:01 AM on July 2