Joining digital pictures can be done quite nicely in an application like MS Word. If two or more pictures represent side-by-side images taken from the same spot over a short interval and with the same camera settings, there is a good chance that you will be able to join them in a seamless fashion if the photos overlap each other slightly. You don’t have to ensure that the camera remains perfectly horizontal, but it is helpful if you can come close to achieving that. Digital cameras work quite well for this purpose because you can see quality results of each frame shortly after the pictures are taken, and you avoid the steps required to get a set of images scanned from photographic prints.

Some corrections may be needed to ensure that the colour balance, brightness, and contrast match well at the joining lines. Some cropping may be needed to trim away portions of some of the frames that extend above or below the extremities of the other frames. If you don’t position the camera on a fixed, flat, horizontal surface, you may need to do a “free rotate” of a few degrees to make the picture content match in the joining lines. Most image applications by Adobe provide a free rotate feature.

It may take some reasoned judgment on the part of the user to determine how big the finished panoramic picture will be and how many pixels should be retained in the individual frames that will be joined. You should have more dots per inch in the individual frames than in the final product in order to preserve picture quality.

MS Word is suggested as a good program to use for joining the frames. You can position each frame accurately and the program retains most of the picture quality. It has a feature that allows you to choose which overlapped frame is in the foreground at each joint. There is a 22-inch limit on page width in the landscape mode. For other reasons, you would probably want to limit the width to about 13 inches — the height can be whatever is convenient, perhaps around 4 inches. Four inches is suggested as a reasonable height for viewing on a screen since you only have to scroll the picture sideways. If 4 inches is a nominal height, then a width of 10 to 13 inches may serve your purposes well.

Let’s jump ahead, for the moment, to the point where you have made seamless joints of the frames in a DOC file set up for more than 13 inches wide. The first thing you need to do is to make a digital image file of the unrefined panoramic picture showing in MS Word. For most users, the best option available to them may be to use the “zoom” feature inherent in the “Desktop\Settings\Screen area” setting. Depending on your computer, you should be able to get to a screen area of at least 1280 X 1024 pixels. The maximum width of an image that can be displayed on the screen will be 13.3 inches.

By temporarily re-setting your screen area to this value you can perform a screen capture and obtain a digital file on the clipboard, which will provide up a 13-inch finished photo size. A screen capture “Copies” the entire screen image on a virtual “clipboard” by striking “Alt” and “Prnt Scrn” at the same time. With the screen-captured image on the clipboard, “Paste” it into MS Word. At this point, the image in MS Paint will be 96 dots per inch, presumably the same size and resolution you will choose for the finished picture, but it will have extraneous picture elements that can be cropped away. The extraneous elements come from the fact that the picture doesn’t completely fill the screen, and there will be some toolbars showing, particularly at top and bottom. Don’t worry about the toolbars present in the MS Paint application, as they are not part of the image.

You can do all or part of the cropping in MS Paint, which presents a temporary image in BMP format. To move the image to another application for conversion to JPG format, you must save the image in some format, and that may as well be BMP. The image conversion program will then be used to make any further quality adjustments to the picture and to convert it to the JPG image format that uses a compressed file format and make the file smaller with little loss of picture quality if a good program and a high enough quality-factor choice is used when converting to JPG.

Now to address the issues involved in making the images join and to ensure that they will blend well with the adjoining frame. First, the user should examine each of the frame images they intend to join end-to-end. Verify that there is some overlap between each picture to be joined. Note if there are dissimilarities between brightness, contrast and colour balance of each frame. Choose a frame image size and dots per inch resolution that fits the requirements for the finished product. It is recommended that the dots per inch be somewhat above 100, perhaps 150. It is recommended that the frames not be cropped, and that the frame height be set just slightly greater than the height of the finished product. It is recommended that these frame images by in JPG format. These are issues that should be worked over carefully to make the next steps go smoothly.

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