Stitching: how do you do it?

By request, I’ve made a short tutorial on how I do stitch downwards/upwards pan scenes using GIMP - it’s fairly simple, and the basic principles extend to other editing programs, even Paint.NET! (which I highly recommend btw, PDN my beloved)

Before you start, you need a set of screencaps that overlap, so you have wriggle room for blending them together if you need.

Then: you start with your first panel (screencap) as your background (1), and resize the canvas downwards to give you enough space for all the panels (2). The size depends on the screencap resolution, but this could end up quite large (3000-5000px isn’t unusual). After this, you add a new layer for each of your panels, and adjust the opacity enough so that you can see where to overlap (3) - I usually go 50-75%, but you don’t need to go too low.

Next: add the second panel to the second layer and align with the first panel below (5). I usually estimate, and then zoom in close and adjust top-bottom-left-right until there’s minimal blur for most lines that overlap. For older shows, you might have blur regardless, but you’ll edit this out next. You might have changes in animation during the pan, such as talking, so you can choose whether to erase them on this layer or keep them when you return the opacity to 100%.

Sometimes you can see a top seam (again, often in older shows, or if there’s a gradient) but if you’re lucky you may not!

After that: for this second layer, make the layer 100% opacity again and erase along the seams (if you have any) with a large-ish eraser on low hardness (6). If you don’t have very good overlap then you’ll have to be careful so that you blend the lines from the panels into each other. You can also clean up blemishes using the eraser (if they’re only on the non-background layers) or clone tool (if you want to blend them out).

Bye bye top seam :)

You keep on doing this for each layer, until you have your whole image stitched together (7)! But you’re not done yet.

Make sure to crop the excess space from your image, including along the left and right edges if you had to adjust laterally, as you’ll have some transparent/white space on one or both sides (8). You might also need or want to resize the image, depending on whether the place you’re uploading to has upload size limits.