Stitching scans of ULF negatives. Advice?

[tim atherton]

hmm - some useful tips - I've got to stitch groups of 20-60 images together of scrolls that were photographed in sections - that should be fun :-(

[Daniel Moore]

Your first and last stop should be PTGui. Any image transformation you can possibly dream up will be supported by it. The Panotools yahoo group is a sea of knowledgable folks who can provide expert support. PTGui, PTAssembler (also top notch) Hugin, PTMac and couple other programs are interfaces for PanoTools code written by Helmut Dersch. All designed for stitching with various degrees of automation. Many support Enblend, Smartblend and Autopano. These take care of automating exposure and color compensation, and automating 'control point' generation. These programs have developed now to the point of add images, press button, panorama. A key point to aligning scanned images is to set a FOV to a very low number like 1, tricking the software to thinking it's working with images taken with a virtual telescope and to eliminate correcting optical distortion. Again, Pantools forum over at Yahoo has answers to questions you haven't thought of yet. Overlap is not usually a concern of the scannist, but needs to become one to stitch effectively. More time, but recovered with reduction post processing corrections.