DoubleTake is for Mac users who like compact cameras, but sometimes wish they could magically pull out a wide angle lens or plug in a sensor with a few extra mega-pixels for that large print. DoubleTake handles this by giving you both automatic and manual control of how to stitch photos together perfectly, with simple drag-and-drop. DoubleTake is simple enough to use that you don’t even require a manual. You can create panoramas, add surroundings to a shot, make posters and much more.
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Starting DoubleTake
To stitch two or more images seamlessly together, wide or high panorama, drag them onto DoubleTake. This will also work when DoubleTake is in the Dock, or if you drag them from iPhoto, Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Bridge.
When DoubleTake opens the images, it takes a look at the edges of the images and makes a guess about the arrangement, left, right, top and bottom. The guess it makes may be mistaken, but you can drag the images into the correct order. If you drag all the images you wish to join at once you get the automatic guess. If you drag one image at at time it gets dropped where you release the mouse.
Moving And Aligning
When you drag the images the overlap is shown with transparent images. This allows you to align the edges in the images, and decide if you want to move the seam away from the middle of the overlap. A diagonal seam can be useful in some cases.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Single click on one image selects it (shown with small red handles). Then it can be moved with the arrow keys or deleted with the backspace.
Locking Overlaps
When you wish to stitch together many images, it is convenient to be able to lock a overlap when it has been aligned. This is the purpose of the overlap menu. Images locked at the overlaps will move together with the mouse. If you select more than one image by clicking on it while holding down the shift key, you can also move the images together.
And When It Looks Just Right
You save the finished image or you drag the saved image back into iPhoto if that was where the images came from.
Crop, Fisheye And Focal Length
Crop - DoubleTake offers three ways of cropping the finished image. Either the total crop, where the white areas surrounding misaligned picture are included, inside cropping with no white areas or manual cropping where you control everything by dragging the red crop handles. The parts which will be cropped away when saving, will be shown dimmed outside the crop rectangle.
Fisheye - Let you apply fisheye style distortion to the image. Good if the image has straight lines across the seam area close to the edges of the image. You can turn this feature off, with horizontal lines bent or with vertical lines bent.
Focal Length - This is only used for the fisheye distortion. The shorter the focal length used when the picture was taken the more distortion. You can adjust the slider and then you use the manual override, to tell DoubleTake what focal length the images were taken at.
Geometry Tools
Each image can be rotated or adjusted individually. The palettes for geometry and color adjustments work on the selected image or images. If you select another image, the palette will update to display the setting for that image.
You select more images by holding down the shift key while clicking on it.
Scale, Rotate And Perspective
The corner handles on the selected image change to show how the image gets changes when you drag the corners. Rotate around a center you choose. Normally DoubleTake rotates images around their center. Many times it is simpler to align 2 images to each other. Bring up the Geometry panel, and double click on the point you wish to rotate around. It gets marked with a red circle. The selected images gets rotated by the sliders. You can move the center to another point by double clicking the next place.
QuickTime VR
You can save any stitched image as QuickTime VR with DoubleTake. To stitch 360 degree seams, you pick the 360 degree menu item in the overlap menu. This duplicates the left image to the right so you can arrange the seam on the “back side”. You can move the duplicated image to align everything up, and when you release the mouse all the images gets rotated together. The save sheet gives you a few options to generate HTML code for embedding QuickTime VR in web pages. You can either use the html code which gets placed on the clipboard, or use the full screen QuickTime VR html setup saved together with the movie.
Large Images
With DoubleTake you can create images which are very large. If you stitch 16 photos from a 12 mega-pixel camera, the final image can end up having more than 100 million pixels. Many applications can not handle images this big, or they become overloaded. Adobe’s PhotoShop Elements has a limit of 30,000 pixels. A 30,000 pixel wide panorama will take a long time to open in Preview on most Macs, so I recommend using the “1:2″ or “1:3″ scaling to get an image less than 15,000 pixels wide.
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