Thought I’d ask this before spending the time trying it out…

I’ve got a pano that I’ve shot and would really like to put a gradient on it. Clearly you can’t do this to all of the individual images (20×10).

I was wondering if anyone had tried the following…
Stitch each column together individually and save it out as an image. Creating, in this case, 20 tall skinny images instead of the original 200.

Then apply the gradient (or other effect) to each image.

Bring the modified images, now 20 × 1 into Stitcher and create the pano.

Wondering what kind of effect this would have on the finished pano?

Anyone tried this?

OK, so I gave it a shot.

Created several strips in Stitcher, saved at TIFF files and then pulled them into Aperture. Used OnOne’s Color Efex Pro 3.0 to apply the gradient. Saved them out again and brought the strips into Stitcher and created a 1 row by 7 column panorama.

Note: the gradient test is not the full width panorama and the gradient is WAY too intense. This was a test to see what would happen in the stitching process with a 1 by “x” series of images.

Things I discovered…
• The sky got a little pixelated.
• The left and right image displayed some keystoning (edges bowed in a bit).
• Top and bottom aren’t completely straight
• The Stitcher-created strips were not all the same width. Assuming this was due to the outer images not having a horizontal overlap.
• Interior strips did not display the keystone effect
• With a little care, you could do this. The exported strips are large (around 100 mb each in this test) but manageable.
• The interior parts of the image didn’t pixelate as much as I thought they might
• Zooming doesn’t appear to be affected
• It’s time-consuming to do this type of effect as you have to build the strips and then do the processing in Aperture, Lightroom or tool of choice and then re-stitch the strips into the full pano

Theoretically, you could do some semi-complex masking with each of the strips. In this example I might want to apply the gradient to just the sky and not the building. Or have everything except the building black and white. You’d need a fast computer with a lot of RAM to be able to do it effectively.

Could I have done this on a fully-stitched image instead of the strips? How does Stitcher handle a 1×1 image?

Gradient test: http://gigapan.org/gigapans/96819

Original: http://gigapan.org/gigapans/96754