Stitching Photos into a Composite Image

Documents that are too large to fit on a scanner’s platen can be scanned in sections and re-assembled into a composite image using image stitching software.  Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor simplifies this process.

Historical newspapers and other large-format documents are too large for consumer-grade, flatbed scanners. The only option is to scan these documents in sections and then re-assemble the sections into a composite image resembling the original document.

Manually reassembling the sections is time consuming and tedious.  The sections invariably requires rotating, panning and sometimes skewing the sections to make them fit into the composite.  Software tools are available to simplify the process.

Microsoft makes a simple, free and effective tool for creating composite images, aptly named the “Image Composite Editor” or ICE.  It is the tool I use for creating digital images of newspapers.