Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Description
PanoStitcher lets you create 360-degree panorama from overlapping photos taken from
the same fixed location, with or without a tripod. It offers both manual and automatic
stitching; allows you to add or remove component images at any time; can stitch images
that have been zoomed to different lengths; automatically balances brightness levels
between images; and can output the final image for the Web or for print.
The PanoStitcher online tutorials (five of them) are very helpful in explaining the whole
procedure of creating a panorama, step-by-step. The vendor also supplies a long list of
advanced topics, with in-depth discussion of each. By going through this material, you
will come across all the issues that face the panoramic photographer, from straightening
the horizon to coping with the movements of people within the scene.
Note: In “minimum requirements,” the developer lists a tiny amount of necessary RAM, quite
inadequate for dealing with large images (as actually explained in Advanced Topic 10).
Comments
PanoStitcher is a very competent, highly forgiving image-stitching package. The automatic
stitching facility is not foolproof, but is not markedly worse than the same facility
in other stitching software. It gives a choice of manual stitching methods to
compensate for any errors that occur automatically. Version 1.5 includes a free virtual
tour authoring feature powered by a Java applet called PixtraTour. If you are looking
for a low-cost entry level package for stitching large images (not necessarily panoramic
ones), PanoStitcher is well worth trying.
If you are more ambitious and want to move beyond 360-degree panoramas to 360×360
“omnirama” images, you will need the vendor’s alternative product OmniStitcher. This
will allow you to stitch full spherical panoramas from images taken by regular cameras.
Version: PanoStitcher 1.5 (2008)
OS: Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP, and Vista
RAM: 16MB (see note)
Supported file formats: Inputs JPEG, BMP, and TIFF; outputs JPEG, TIFF, and QuickTime
Price level: Approx. $30
Address: info@pixtra.com
www.pixtra.com
Panoweaver
Chapter 24 ■ Panorama Software: Photo Stitching and Virtual Tours 265
Vendor: Easypano
Purpose: Pro-level stitching software to combine two hemispherical fisheye images into a
360-degree spherical panorama