Hi.,

Does anyone here know of a program, preferably either free or cheap, that can stitch together photos with arbitrary rotation? Canon Photostitch and others of that type require all the images to have a similar orientation, but I want to create a large mosaic from a load of photos that aren't necessarily all pointing the same way even though they overlap.

The photos come, of course, from the air via a model aircraft. My current camera plane has an Ixus 400 with a 1GB CF card in it, triggered by an external radio-controlled shot sequencer. I can take pictures automatically every 4 seconds for about half an hour, and at about 300 meters and up at the normal sort of airspeed they overlap by about 20% or so. What I want to be able to do is fly the thing back and forth in a sort of raster pattern over an area of a square kilometer or so, take all the best, adjacent pictures, and put them together into one huge image.

Sure, I can do it manually with photoshop, but it's a hell of a lot of work. If there is something that will do a lot of it automatically that would help.

Any ideas?

pca