I got some stitching software with the software disc that came with my first digital compact almost 15 year ago.. I don't think I ever got it to work properly until I upgraded the PC half a decade later to something with more than 16Mb of RAM! Then I started trying to stitch pictures taken with a 7.1Mpix compact instead of a 1.3Mpix one it came with and it didn't like the big pictures! lol! did a far job when I shrunk them a bit though.
Photo-Shop has been a little more friendly, but my PC with 8Gig of RAM now, still gets a bit over-wrought by bigger, 24Mpix pictures if you have more than a dozen or so to stitch, and I have had to pre-orientate them before stitching.
Most 'successful' has been to stitch 'sections' of 35mm negative photo'd in an old slide duplicator lens to try get 'cheap' high res scans from them since my old SCSI scanner decided it didn't like anything newer than Windows 98! Main 'lesson' of this exercise has been that 'tracking' across a flat 35mm neg, the software has no angular re-orientation to do and has a much easier time and delvers a much less distorted 'stitch' than in real world 'panning' taking a sequence of pictures from the same view-point and swivelling on the spot to get the width of view.
I the real world, lacking anything wider than the kit 18-55 on my widgetal, stitching 'success' has been a bit patchy at best and perhaps a six shot stitch, I think this was:-
You get a pretty dramatic amount of bananering from the middle, far more I think than I'd get using the 'full-fish' and taking a crop out of it.
That one, I think was about ten or twelve shots, taken in portrait and two rows accross the frame to cover the whole hole of the ancient Llandudno copper mines. maintaining exposure for the stitch across frames, and selecting one to get the detail the shadow of that there 'ole, though has blown the sky... subject doesn't accentuate it like the pier, but banana distortions still there, and folk on the steps blurred from over-laying shots taken moments apart.....
Technology is impressive, BUT.. I don't think its a real substitute for a proper wide lens... actually here....
Reason for not having any other lens to hand... not much space on that to pack 'extras', especially when you have a pillion and camping gear... but I think that was about a six 'portrait' shot stitch of view from tent one morning.. for comparison, aprox the same 'range' and scale, is the same bike shot with a fish :-
Amount of bow is, I think a lot less pronounce from the full-fish, distortion on the stitch, as shown by the pier shot tending from little at the edges and increasing towards the middle, where from a fish distortion is less in the middle and not so much more at the edges.
Hopefully got a rectilinear UWA arriving this week, so will be interesting to compare how that fares in such circumstances. but I wouldn't have stumped up for that if could have got the results I'd hoped for with stitching... nice to know you can get results with a stitch, but, wider you go with one, more perverse I think the distortion gets, as said, to the same degree even as a full fish, but in a different way.
I think that stitching has to be viewed, like fish eyes, as offering a completely different effect to a rectilinear UWA rather than a substitute for one.
