Panorama Maker
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Updated: 25 Jul 2000 at 5:00 GMT,
by James Rigg
[Panoguide]
This review refers to version 1.0
Panorama Maker 2000 is the cheapest commercial panorama stitching tool I have reviewed to date, excluding all the tools that are completely free. It is clearly intended to be a simple to use stitching tool for stitching images of all kinds (not just panoramas) together, and it has a fairly straight forward and graphically rich interface.
ArcSoft have tried to strike the right balance between a very easy to use tool and one that offers the functionality required to get good results. Unfortunately they didn't get it right: the performance tests show consistently bad results for my test images when using automatic stitching. You needn't specify your lens (useful if you don't know what it is anyway), but if Panorama Maker 2000 ever mis-judges your lens you will only be able to specify your lens in non-360 degree stitching mode and even then you are restricted to a fixed list which means you cannot put in a more accurate effective focal length for your scans from film (nor estimates of the focal length of your scans).
Manual alignment is done by positioning pairs of markers. Although this is probably not as intuitive as clicking and dragging images until they align, other software uses markers very effectively (e.g. Image Assembler). In Panorama Maker 2000 I found that positioning markers gave unpredictable results and that a lot of experimentation would be required to get the alignment right if the software didn't get it right first time.
I'm sorry to say that Panorama Maker 2000 is likely to disappoint its users. After all there is other software out there that is completely free, equally easy to use and produces better results (e.g. PixAround PixMaker Lite)