Photo stitching (old manuscripts)

[kartracer]

I have some old fragmented photos of manuscripts (family heirlooms) that I'd like to try and recover/restore by stitching photos together.

I stitching software for this application likely to work well?

Any suggestions or recommendations for particular software?

Edit: I meant to say scans, not photographs (so how to best stitch together several scans of print)

 

[john.margetts]

I have successfully done this using Photoshop Elements. The document concerned was an Act of Parliament relating to the enclosure of land in Lincolnshire around 1780. The parts of the document were shot using a hand-held camera, three shots across the document to get it all in.

First, I loaded the three photos for each document as layers into a new document with a large enough canvas size to hold the finished document. Then I used the top line of text and used the levelling tool to get this one line level on the three layers. Next I had to stretch/shrink each layer so that the bottom lines lined up as well as the top one. I then merged down and exported as a Jpeg file. The historian I was doing this for then paid a lot of money to have the jpegs printed - these were large documents and much too large for my printer if we wanted to be able to read them.