PhotoVista Panorama

Product version: PhotoVista Panorama v. 2.0

The interface is little changed from version 1.32 except for the rebranding of course. After starting up PhotoVista, the first thing to do is to load in your pictures. Here there is a new feature to auto-crop your pictures (new in v2.0).

The main interface then shows your pictures ready for stitching

But first you need to specify what camera or lens you used

If you don't know the lens, are getting bad results or if you scanned prints or used a film scanner that doesn't allow you to scan the full film frame, it's a good idea to use the custom lens function and after entering your best guess for the lens, click 'fine tune'. PhotoVista will then do some calculations and come back with a different focal length it thinks will work best. Generally it guesses quite well and will perform better if you follow it's guesses rather than your own.

Note that the lenses window looks slightly different in version 2.01 which comes with MGI Virtual Tour:

Click stitch and you can do a preview stitch (fast) in order to get a quick look at how the panorama is likely to look. This allows you to spot any problem areas where perhaps PhotoVista will need help with alignment.

After stitching, the images in the main window will appear aligned, and you can click and drag the images around to adjust alignment

You can also open a separate window that allows you to align the images at full resolution. Shame there's no zoom buttons or panning controls though in case you stitch very large images (like me).

Once you have done a stitch you can obviously save it, but you can also convert it to a number of other projection types and adjust the settings (i.e. alter the fields of view to affect the projection of the image).