Copied from my LiveJournal, which I think none of you read, so it's new to you!

I have a sets of scans which are pieces of a whole picture. For the sake of argument, let's say there are 4 pieces of each item, which I'd like to paste together.

So, I tried pnmstitch. It couldn't handle it, and I got a blurred join.
Fine. So I tried the Video Orbits (Comparametic Toolkit) method. There wasn't enough overlap in the images, apparently, and I lost. Well, crap. Fine.

So I found "Photomerge" in Photoshop 8 Creative Suite. Great, right? Wrong. It still gives a blurry joint instead of reprojecting or stretching or whatever it needs to do.

Ok, surely there's a way to solve this. What is it?