Special blend operations (referred to as “image seam-matching”) are described that keep the pixel values in the two images being blended the same along their transition border or seam, and smoothly increases/decreases pixel values on either side of the seam through the images' transition band (an area around the seam in which image blend operations are constrained). Image seam-matching provides many of the benefits of gradient blending (e.g., the avoidance of ghosting), without the associated computational overhead. This makes image seam-matching a particularly useful approach for real-time image processing such as during the real-time generation of wide area-of-view images. In situations where image seam-matching may be inappropriate, such as when the images being blended include long objects that span an entire overlap region(s), a mechanism is described which allows the selection of either, or both, seam-matching and cross-fading blend operations in a graceful or smooth manner.