The Panorama Factory
The Panorama Factory lets you stitch overlapping images to make full 360° panoramas and virtual tours. 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 runs on both Windows and Mac; 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 has 64-bit processor support. There is a batch processing version for heavy users of panoramas, at double the price.
Comment
The Panorama Factory started out as freeware -- but look at it now after several years of intensive development! People love the way it joins images automatically and blends them seamlessly together.
If you have any doubts about whether The Panorama Factory is being kept up-to-date, check out the What's New file. There have been a bewildering number of updates and editions -- including the all-import Mac edition -- in the past few years.
The fact that The Panorama Factory is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional and Norwegian-Bokmal is a sure sign that users have rallied around the product.
Tech info
- OS: Windows XP onwards; Mac OS X
- Price level: Approx. $80; (with batch processing) $160
Smoky City Design
Started by recumbent biker John Strait, Smoky City Design has gone from strength to strength, winning a substantial user base of enthusiastic pano users.
From the same vendor:
- (many versions of The Panorama Factory)
- Batch module (a separate application)
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