[Courses][gimp] Lesson 10: Stitching Panoramic Images

[Akkana Peck]

Julie Sloan writes:
> I have been putting it off too.  I'm thinking about doing it a bit 
> differently - for about a week I took pictures of a tree in my yard as it 
> leafed out.  Hopefully all these pictures will line up on top of each 
> other.  I'm not sure what I want to do with it once I have them stacked up 

Oh, cool!

It might be hard to make an actual panorama out of that (well, you
could, but there won't be parts to match on one side vs. the other)
though both the ideas you talked about sound like they'd be really
interesting images to see.  I'm looking forward to seeing what
you do with the tree series!

Aut there are other things you can do with it.
For instance, you can make an animation.  To do that, you need to
make an image that has all the layers stacked in order, one on top
of the other, and lined up.  Then, if you save as GIF, there's an
option in the GIF save plugin for choosing Animated.

Of course, GIF is a lousy format for photos (it only allows 8 bits
of color per channel, so the full color won't come through) but
it's sometimes worth it for GIF animations that you can put on a web
page and show in any browser.

How do you line up the images?  Pretty much like in the panorama
lesson.  Turn off visibility on all but the first two images, make
the higher of those two images partially transparent with the
transparency slider in the layers dialog, then use the move tool to
move it around until they line up.  Then slide transparency back to
100% (opaque), make the next layer visible, make it semi-transparent,
and repeat until they're all lined up and all 100% opaque.

Patricia Peck writes:
> matching wouldn't be so important, except to have the trunk and major 
> branches in the same place in each shot.  For the leaf part, you'd have 
> to sort of dissolve, wouldn't you?
> 
> And thinking of dissolving from one image to another - do we know how to 
> do that?  Maybe do overlapping gradients, one coming in and one going 
> out?  Hmmm... must ask Akkana if that would work, and how.

A dissolve as I know the term implies something that happens over
time, so I guess you're talking about an animation?  I'm not sure if
the GIF save plugin has an option to dissolve from one image to the
next, though there are other programs to do that sort of thing.
Perhaps GAP (the gimp animation package) plugin can, though it's
much more elaborate and oriented more toward movie making than just
animated images.  I haven't used GAP yet myself, so I don't know how
easy or difficult this might be.

	...Akkana