Is stitching the future of photography?

[Dave Jeffery]

Will this program or one like it become the new visual Wikipedia? I imagine they may become linked together.

[Dave Jeffery]

It can eventually be used as a visual aid in the game of geocaching as well.

OK, I'll stop with the possibilities as they seem to be somewhat endless.

[Marko]

Live and learn, a Mac version of Micrsoft software! I hope it works better than their previous two packages...

[Dave Jeffery]

Well said Marko.
I'm really not comfortable with the fact that there is no pop up nag screen asking me if I really want to view the images. Microsoft must be cutting back spending at the moment.

[cjbroadbent]

In answer to the original question. No. The future is large format sensors. But I won't live to see it.
Photography took 100 years to progess downwards from full-plate to pocket-instamatic. Now it might well take another 100 years to progress from pocket-instamatic size sensors to full-plate again.
The longer the lens, the more detail I see. Stitching is a kludge. I am stitching now to cover the whole scene with a small format sensor stuck behind a long lens.
I hope to live just long enough to see a 4x5 sensor. But I suppose, even then, I would stick a 240mm lens in front and do 6 stitches.

[Brian Ellis]

Hi Kirk - just got done in dkrm - I don't do comps or multiple image work except for
commercial, never for personal prints. But I'll give you an example. Had a collector
who was marrying an olympic swimmer - handsome couple - and they wanted their
portrait large format in Ciba. In other words, don't move (I don't like flash). Took two shots - in one the groom was squinting, in other other his expression was great
but he had a horrible wrinkle on his tuxedo from a bent elbow. Quite a dilemma since I couldn't reshoot. Fortunatley the tux was deep black. I simply dissected the
good arm from one shot with a pair of surgical scissors and a good magnifier, sanded the edges, an pasted it onto the other chrome. Only took about 15min. Back
then it would have cost an arm and a leg to get it scanned, corrected, and put through a film recorder. But even now, with home-style Photoshop, a digitally corrected image would have lost all the equisite detail in the Ciba print which the
client specifically requested and would have probably taken more time. When it was
printed, you could even count the stitches in the fabric (of course the overlapping area was sightly burned in to hide the overlapping edgeitself). I've done a number of things like that over the years. In this case, the rules specified by the client were,
"nothing digital". He was a very successful software engineer.

You think that would be a "nightmare" in Photoshop? Doing that in Photoshop would take about a minute, possibly two minutes depending on how hard it was to select the arm. We could argue over how much "exquisite detail" would have been lost and on how much better your Ciba might be but not on the point that doing this in Photoshop isn't even close to being a nightmare.

[Drew Wiley]

Hi Brian, back when this happened you had to go to a big lab for digital corrections.
By the time a film-recorder dupe was made you were out at least 500 bucks. But even
today, although PS would simplify the problem in principle, you would still be dependent
upon a film recorder for a usable image. The client wanted Ciba, period, printed by me,
period. Absolutely no type of digital output will give that kind of look with that kind of
detail, which you'd lose even thru the film recorder. I was merely using this incident as an example. But it amuses me that in today's tech generation how things are often
made harder than necessary, just because all the high-tech gadgetry is available.
Photoshop simpler? Well, let's see ... you need a working drum scanner, the PS program
and computer, the film recorder or output device. That's quite an investment, and a lot
of maintenance too for the rare blooper. And you still have to print it. I'm not knocking
other people's workflow or preferences, or the day-in-day out pros and cons. But I'm
not a commercial lab, either, and don't have to bend and twist other people's shots
into something visually usable. This is a correction that cost me less than ten cents
and perhaps ten or twenty minutes of time. Could you even drum scan it that fast????