Stitching "panoramas" from a scanner

[PeterAit]

A friend has asked me to digitize his family's scrapbook of old photos, documents, and the like. The pages are wider (but not taller) than my V750 scanner can do, however. I was thinking about scanning the left and right portions of each page separately and using a panorama stitching program to join them together. Any thoughts?

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

A friend has asked me to digitize his family's scrapbook of old photos, documents, and the like. The pages are wider (but not taller) than my V750 scanner can do, however. I was thinking about scanning the left and right portions of each page separately and using a panorama stitching program to join them together. Any thoughts?

Hi Peter,

That should not be a problem for a competent stitching application, although some specific settings are required. It should also be relatively easy to do in Photoshop, but then by simply shifting the photos on a large canvas first. The benefit of using a stitching program is that the quality of small rotation angles and sub-pixel shifts is much higher due to superior resampling algorithms, although you'll probably down-sample the result anyway.

I recently had to do something similar, although in this case it was a large (5.25 x 3.94 feet) embroidered shawl like work from Sri Lanka that exceeded the space I could light evenly. So I shot it as 8 tiles (camera on tripod, moving the shawl from shot to shot) , stitched them together, and squared things, with PTGUI (using Viewpoint correction).

Cheers,
Bart

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Since I've been doing digital for about 12 years, I have digitized most of the previous fifty years of film images that I still care about. Unfortunately, the negatives are missing from several of my favorites, and I have had to scan my best 11x14" prints of those in two sections, exactly as Bart describes. My Epson 4990 scanner will do about 8.5x14", so I had to scan each print in two 8.5x11" sections, which I then merged in Photoshop. The overlap was sufficient so that I had to do no other cleaning up, and I have not been able to see the transition at all. I have made 13x19" prints that are indistinguishable (except for size) from the original darkroom prints.

At least for monochrome prints, PS is very easy and does a fine job.