I've stitched a few image pairs together before, but this weekend I completed my first cylindrical projection, 197° horizontal field of view over five images, using PTGUI to handle the stitching.

After the quality problems I had with my previous stitching attempts (one using Hugin, another using a trial version of PTGUI), I had been expecting not to generate particularly good results. I managed to pleasantly surprise myself, however, and without checking against the master stitching file, I can't find the seams in the result anymore, and I'm satisfied with the overall output quality. On top of that, the sepia version of a two-image stitch I did last week is going to end up in my collection as one of my best images yet.

The only problem is the amount of time that it takes to get everything just right. I spent probably twelve hours this weekend working on that one panorama. I'm hoping that the experience will make me faster, as I have at least two more panos to create in the current batch of images (day 4 of the Washington trip, the second day of the hike itself), one with three images, and one with seven.

No images are posted yet; I plan to do all of the editing in one pass, and then upload and annotate in another. This keeps me from getting too bogged down in memories of the trip as I work.