DoubleTake and My First Panorama

DoubleTake has really impressed me and I'd like to share the results with you. But first, let me compliment the author, Henrik Dalgaard, for creating a program which epitomises the raison d'être of any, good piece of software - namely, to take a complicated processing task and make it's operation simple and intuitive for the end user. Creating a panoramic image with DoubleTake is as easy dragging images (in any order) into the DoubleTake window, positioning them approximately in the correct order, then waiting briefly for DoubleTake to seamlessly join them together... and that's all there is to it.

I recently made a trip to Berlin (Germany) and, on the exterior wall of the former Luftwaffe headquarters (in what used to be East Berlin) there is large Soviet propaganda mural portraying the qualities of the socialist dream.

I wanted to photograph the entire mural for posterity, but also because I love the artistic style (anyone know what it's called?)

So I decided to photograph the painting in segments which I planned to manually stitch together in the GIMP upon my return to England. When I tried to do that however, I realised that it wasn't going to be as easy as I had first thought. The GIMP, while an amazingly sophisticated image-processing tool, just doesn't have the facilities to do what I wanted to do (I'm sure someone will correct me on this). Hence the search that took me to DoubleTake.

Anyway, enough of the foreplay, on to the results. I've included links to the full-size images for those of you who would like to examine the stitching up close. Enjoy!

• Mural cropped (1,600 x197 pixels)
• Mural uncropped (1,600 x 247 pixels)
• Mural cropped full-size (13,995 x 1,726 pixels) 26MB
• Mural uncropped full-size (13,995 x 2,162 pixels) 30MB