Windows Live Essential 2011 was rolled out yesterday a product built again from scratch with lot of features. To start with I picked up Windows Live Gallery which is a photo editing tool for desktop and has two very interesting features with it, Panorama and Photo Fuse both which always required professional software or editors but is now in everybody’s tool.
Panorama Pictures : In simple words you can all this process as stitching of photos. For example if you have been to a fort which is huge and your camera can capture only parts of it even if you shot only one side of it. Panorama Process can combine these pictures into one by finding the overlap and the final picture seems like you took it all in one shot.
Below is an example of Panorama of Lake at Pushkar near Nathdwara. I took multiple snap of the lake and then combined into one.
Now in the above examples there are lot of flaws you can make out. Its 80% done. If you are planning to create panorama images the best tips is to take pictures in such a way that each one is overlapping parts of other and take it from single point. More like just move your camera from left to right and take snaps. Read more here
Microsoft Research has one tool ICE which we tested before to stitch photos and there is a plugin which lets you visualize these stitched photos if they are of very high definition.
Photo Fuse : Photo fuse is very similar to Panorama but yet different. Instead of stitching pictures here we are trying to combine them into one. So for example if you take snap of your family members one by one at the same place but make them move a to next position so that each get their own space and then later combine them into one or another example would be taking snaps of yourself at different positions.
Below is minor example of Photo Fuse of my son Anant who gave first snapshot while standing and then he ran but was a bit right.
Here you can see that my angle was pretty large which included a lot of floor area and surroundings ( the table stayed at same place). Jason at Windows team Blog has an excellent example of fuse if you want to take a look.
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