How to create panoramas: the manual

There are mainly two methods for creating panoramas:
- You have a camera which allows to take panoramas. You are the lucky one!
- You take several pictures and assemble these with a software. That's how I do it and what I'll describe below.

What do we need:
- a computer (hehehe, funny isn't it?).
- two or more pictures that have overlapping areas.
- a stitching software.
- a photo editing software.

The computer and its OS:
It doesn't matter what OS you have, as there's software for nearly every OS. I'm used to have MacOS X and Linux, but I know that Windows has also several good tools.

The stitching software:
The one I use is an open source named Hugin. It can be download here: hugin.sourceforge.net/
Hugin is running on MacOS X, Linux and Windows. They also provide very good tutorials (in English, French, German, etc.) to learn how to use it (here: hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/index.shtml). You will probably need these tutorials, because the software isn't that easy to learn.
A lot of other software can do about the same. You can easily find these on Google by searching for the words: stitching software. Give it a try!

The photo editing software:
When your pictures were assembled, you may need a photo editing software to cut the edges and/or to modify the colors (gamma editing).
Here we have several possibilities:
- the Gimp is a good one, but may be a bit difficult to learn (www.gimp.org/).
- Pinta is much easier to use (pinta-project.com/), but it's hard to install it on Windows, because it uses an X11 port.
- So on Windows, you can use the very good freeware named PhotoFiltre (photofiltre.free.fr/frames_en.htm). There's an English version as well.