[jstraw]

Hello, I am hoping to find an application that can do this better than Appleworks.

I need to stitch together several (about ten) separate .jpg files which are all pieces of a scanned image. I then need to convert the resulting large image to a Windows bit-map file (.bmp) format for use with some other software that only uses .bmp files. I've made good progress on this in Appleworks, but these are big files (I set Appleworks to be working on a 54 inch 'page') and after I add three or four of the .jpg files, Appleworks starts to leave digital artefacts laying around the big image. Also, when I have several done and try to convert to .bmp, only portions of the large file get converted.

I'm hoping to find an application that will handle the stitching a little better as well, specifically by erasing the extraneous parts of the images that are duplicated near the stitching points. Appleworks seems to keep all of the data from both images, and this drags down the results after a while.

I do have plenty of horsepower for this; a new MacBook Pro with the 2.4ghz processors but still with only 2 GB of RAM.

Any ideas? I'd purchase software for this but don't expect to need to do this again anytime soon, so I don't really want to get something expensive like Adobe Illustrator for example.

[mdawson]

What you are trying to accomplish is way beyond what the image editor module in Appleworks is designed to handle. The task you are attempting needs to be performed in a dedicated image editor such as Photoshop and not Illustrator, which is a vector-based drwawing/illustration package; JPEGs are image (bitmap) files and not vector/Bezier illustrations. Of course, Photoshop is a very expensive professional application, but its little sibling Photoshop Elements should be up to the task. There are also plug-ins for Photoshop that are specifically designed for creating panoramas from multiple images.
As you do not plan to do this on a regular basis, Graphic Converter is probably all you need. It costs a mere $35 and many people swear by it in a pinch; it can also use Photoshop plug-ins.