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Computer software advice requested


carbking

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The Stromberg carburetor archives are on 500 foot rolls of microfilm. When Stromberg (or whoever did the filming for them) photographed 36 inch by 48 inch drawings, they photographed them as 4 overlapping photos.

I am slowing digitizing the archives. Run the filmstrips through a Wolverine filmstrip scanner, then copy individual photos into Photoshop, and correcting pixel counts to be usable information WITHOUT having to roll through 500 feet to find out the necessary information.

I am digitizing the pictures at 300 ppi. Seems to be a workable resolution.

What is a decent, easy to learn picture stitching software? 

I am using Windows 7 Professional version. I will NOT convert to Windows 10 at this time (maybe never). Yes, I am a stick-in-the-mud, but have dozens of thousands of data files that are NOT compatible with Office 10, let alone Windows 10. 

So whatever is recommended must be compatible with Windows 7 Professional.

Thanks in advance.

Jon.

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Thanks to all. I bookmarked all of the above, and will try them. Not sure how well they will work with drawings, will see. Have given some thought to just printing each of the 4 overlapping corners, manually pasting together, and re-photographing as a single image.

 

Jon.

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https://www.irfanview.com/

 

Free download, but it is a really good program, so I send him a few bucks every year.  I use 32 bit, even though I have a 64 bit laptop.  Download the program and the plugins.  Easy to use, short learning curve.  This required 'Copy', Paste Special-bottom' 'Rotate' 'Negative', and resize - less than a minute.

 

If you need something more powerful, but big learning curve, try GIMP, again free.

 

https://www.gimp.org/

 

Hope it helps.

 

Huntz

stitched.jpg

Edited by HuntzNSam (see edit history)
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OK - I think time to put this one to rest.

 

First, I would like to thank all who responded.

 

I had successfully printed and pasted together one of the smaller prints; however:

 

When I tried the stitching software (pretty easy, even for me), I found the pixel counts were not the same on all portions; which meant stitching was impossible. So I have two options:

(1) Spend a lot of time with Photoshop adjusting pixel counts so the size of the portions comes up equal.

(2) Digitize the prints into 4 separate files (Print-1-pass-1, print-1-pass-2, print-1-pass-3, print-1-pass-4).

 

If I ever need one of the oversize prints, I can print all four passes and read the necessary information.

 

Again, thanks to all.

 

Jon.

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I used Hugin just now.

 

I had three photos I took as a panorama, all the same pixel count. Photo 0 remained as is. Photo 1 I reduced the pixel count to 90% and photo 2 I reduced to 80% and save on disk. The stitched panorama was pretty good, the main problem being that as I took the panorama the cloud and mist was rolling in from the right so Photo 2 has the upper part hidden in cloud, compressing the area of control points. As saved on disk, they are 4.18 MB, 645 and 861 kB.

 

I haven't come across the different pixel density being a problem. I am surprised by this problem.

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