It seems still that the easiest way to overcome different exposures is to reduce the number of colors in the images, like I did with this one taken near the ferry landing in Essex, New York. My various forms of imaging software can reduce the millions of colors in a digital photo into a smaller set of 256 colors or even 16 colors, but even then there's some issues. One limitation is that I can't use the same optimized palette across images. A second is that even reducing to 256 colors may not be enough, since differences in exposure may force the software to choose two different shades when I'm looking for those shades to match. Finally, some of the resulting color choices are unrealistic, like the purple in this one, or even worse, they're ugly.

One way I've found to get around color issues is to not really care. This is a false-color version of the same picture as above. Although I thought it came out pretty well, it's more art than photography, and seems like cheating somehow.

L. L. McAllister's first panoramic photograph was taken at the corner of College Street and St. Paul Street in Burlington, Vermont during the Winter of 1915. Eighty-Nine years later, I tried to duplicate his shot from the same corner and perspective, but I ended up having only have two-thirds of his panoramic because my first shot was so off I couldn't line it up with the others. Still, after some digital manipulation the resulting graphic was nice enough that I considered it mug-worthy. The trees came out especially well, but once again I have to deal with that phantom purple color due to the color reduction techniques I've been using.

Here's one where being able to resort to false colors actually was an improvement over the originals. This panoramic was generated from a series of photos I took from the top of the Henderson Park tower in Montpelier, Vermont, in November, 2002. The original pictures were in color, but I had two problems. First, it was November in Vermont, which is a fairly ugly time of year for the home state. The dominant colors were gray and brown. Second, exposure differences made if hard to line up some of the photos, so I switched it all to black and white. I was able to line up everything well, but the result was somewhat boring, so I ran it though some filters to make it red-and-white, and it came out more interesting that way.

Finally for this round, here's another attempt at preserving as much original color as possible. Here's Portland, Maine in 256- color glory. This one is three photographs stitched together, and once again I had exposure differences to contend with. I tried to match the exposures as best I can before reducing each to 256 colors. I used a pattern dithering method in an attempt to fake a newsprint photograph. Even after that I had to do a lot of manual touchups to remove the lines between the individual photos.