Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Photovista Panorama comes in several editions—Home, Pro, and International—all
with broadly similar features. The International edition is available in French, Italian,
German, and Spanish. It also forms part of the Reality Studio professional multimedia
toolkit, which includes the vendor’s Photovista 3D Objects software for creating detailed
photo-realistic 3D image objects.
Comments
Virtual tours are a popular way of presenting properties on the Internet, a market where
iseemedia has a significant share. With automatic warping, aligning, and blending, it is
a very capable package that anyone can use. Enthusiasts will not find it very challenging,
but it aims to be a low-cost solution for the use of realtors.
Version: Photovista Panorama (Windows) 3.5, (Mac) 3.0 (2008)
OS: Windows ME and XP; Mac OS 9.1 and OS X 10.2
RAM: 16MB (32MB recommended)
Supported file formats: GIF, JPEG, BMP, and FPX
Price level: Approx. $100, Professional edition $200
Address: Iseemedia, Inc., 180 Jardin Drive, Suite 6, Concord, Ontario, L4K 1X8, Canada
www.iseephotovista.com
PTGui
Chapter 24 ■ Panorama Software: Photo Stitching and Virtual Tours 267
Vendor: New House Internet Services
Purpose: A graphical front-end for PanoTools, to stitch planar images, cylinders, spheres, and
cubes
Description
PTGui stands for “graphical user interface for panorama tools,” the latter being the early
set of stitching tools created by Helmut Dersch. Although Dersch’s tools were capable
of handling most lens types and could cope with many different formats and projections,
they were difficult to use without an additional interface. Dutch developer Joost
Nieuwenhuijse wrote PTGui as a graphical front-end that would enable anyone to use
the tools, including those for correcting lens distortion.
PTGui can stitch planar images, cylinders, spheres, and cubes. It supports both rectilinear
and fisheye lenses and several image file formats. It obtains lens details by reading
Exif information. In earlier versions, it required you to insert control points (called
“flags”) manually in order to align the images, but it is now completely automatic, with
manual fine-tuning. Once alignment has been done, it quickly stitches the images
together ready for output to many additional formats. PTGui Pro has exposure correction,
automatic vignetting and white balance correction, HDR support, plus many other
features.