AutoStitch

Wow! This one word is hardly enough to describe the performance of AutoStitch, a $1.99 program to stitch panoramas on your iPhone. And it makes me eat my own words that the iPhone is not ready yet for panorama photography.

Once installed, the process to stitch a panorama could not be simpler. Contrary to other programs where you have to carefully align and then capture the images within the app, AutoStitch assumes you have the images already on your iPhone. So just use the camera app and shoot some images. Within the app, select the images you want to stitch, tap stitch and then wait a bit until the panorama is aligned, blended and stitched. Once done, just tap save and you are done.

The outcome of several test stitches was excellent. AutoStitch correctly aligned multiple images in horizontal or matrix panoramas without any visible artifacts, unless you did some pixel-peeping. Blending was very good indoors (image on the right) and showed the usual sky blending issues (see image below) in outdoor shots, which is more of an issue with not being able to set exposure on an iPhone 3G than with AutoStitch (this should be better through tap-to-focus/expose on the iPhone 3GS, although only slightly). I have not tested ghosting, but will report back, once I know how AutoStitch deals with it.

Overall, I was amazed by the quality of the stitched images. Given the low quality of the iPhone 3G camera, the output of a Photoshop stitch did not look significantly better than AutoStitch’s. If you do not have Photoshop or do want to stitch on the iPhone, AutoStitch is the app to use!

AutoStitch does have some short-comings, though. I would have liked to see a crop feature, so I could have cropped off the black bars and wiggly lines so typical in raw stitches. However, I could easily crop these stitches in PhotoGene (or Editor’s Pick for Photo Editing); thus, it’s not too much of a shortcoming. And while I could stitch a horizontal (multiple shots in one row) and matrix (many rows by many columns) panorama, I could not stitch a vertical (multiple shots in one column) panorama in AutoStitch (I could only after rotating each shot in PhotoGene before the stitch and then rotating the resulting panorama again in PhotoGene after the stitch was complete). Other than that, AutoStitch exceeded all my expectations.

One additional warning: Stitching is very resource-intensive and thus has quite an impact on battery life and the temperature of your iPhone. But this is true with all panorama stitching apps.

Overall, for the price ($1.99) you get a ton of functionality and great output quality. Which not only earns AutoStitch an easy Editor’s Pick from us, but also leaves the competition with a very high hurdle to overcome!

Price: $1.99 in iTunes

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