I'm going to be getting a color printer and am looking at stitching together output for use on classroom bulletin boards. For example, if I wanted to make a large header (approx 2 x 3 feet or larger) for a bulletin board for displaying student thematic work, if I took several shots of say, a stage coach, a state capitol building, the Statue of Liberty, etc., would the autostitch type programs support printing multiple pages that could be "mosaiced" on a board, or, would the file sizes be so large that I would be better off just doing it by hand using multiple individual shots, scans and prints by carefulling working off a tripod and planning overlaps. Currently I have a 200 meghertz Pentium IBM clone. I'm going to upgrade to 64 meg. RAM and would consider more if this approach is practical. The cheap alternative would be to use an overhead projector or a slide projector and hand trace on plain paper.

-- Craig Gillette (cgillette@thegrid.net), April 15, 1999

Answers

I would say use a stitching program. They do far more than just sliding the images around until the lap correctly. They correct for the distortion introduced by the lens so the images join perfectly. The stitching and printing are two quite separate processes, so printing a mosaic of pages is dependent on whatever you view/edit the stitched image with. Even for large subjects you probably won't stitch more 8 by 8 shots so thats ther limit of what your processor will have to handle. This will will strain a 64meg system, but with plenty of virtual memory and patience it's doable. To make an 8 by 8 image into poster size (say 8 by 8 pages) you'll be printing at fairly low resolution (approx. 100 dpi), but billboard posters are way lower than that and the low spatial resolution means that dithering should give good (perceived) colour resolution.

-- Kevin Sharp (kevin.sharp@bigfoot.com), June 10, 1999.