Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Description
The Panorama Factory lets you stitch overlapping images to create full 360-degree
panoramas. Its rich feature set includes a wizard interface, automatic detection of focal
length, detection of camera rotation and tilt, easy rotation of imported images, and automatic
and manual correction for barrel distortion, brightness falloff, and ghosting.
The Panorama Factory accepts 24-bit and 45-bit color images (15 bits each for red,
green, and blue), has a library of over 800 digital camera models including DSLRs,
exports to layered Photoshop image format, and includes 64-bit processor support.
Comments
The fact that The Panorama Factory is available in English, French, Italian, German,
Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Chinese, Slovak, and Russian is a
sure sign that users have rallied around the product. Developed by recumbent biker
John Strait, it started out as freeware—and look at it now! People love the way it joins
images automatically and blends them seamlessly together. It lets you create autopanning
virtual tours, with hotspots and Web page creation. Version 5 brought the product to the
Macintosh platform, complete with Cubic QTVR import and export. Professional users
can now enjoy a color-managed workflow, with read/write of embedded color profiles
and ColorSync (Mac) or Image Color Management (Windows) to control color in
printing and display.
Version: The Panorama Factory 5.1 (2008)
OS: Windows 98 or newer; Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer
RAM: 512MB
Supported file formats: Reads/writes BMP, JPEG, TIFF, and PNG; outputs QTVR, IVR,
PTViewer, and HTML image map format
Price level: Approx. $80
Address: Smoky City Design, 1017 N. Sheridan Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15206-1718, United States
www.panoramafactory.com
Summary
Chapter 24 ■ Panorama Software: Photo Stitching and Virtual Tours 275
Creating panoramas has become almost a subset of digital photography, with specialist
hardware such as “pano heads” plus a whole range of software aimed at different sectors
of the market. This chapter described packages for making high quality, artistic panoramas,
together with others that address the needs of real estate agents and holiday companies
who want to offer virtual tours of their properties online. Photographers wanting
to experiment with these techniques can start with PTGui and stitch images together
from a standard camera/tripod combination. The best results, however, will be obtained
by using the right hardware and an advanced package like Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited.