Spin Panorama

Rating:
Updated: 3 Mar 2001 at 5:00 GMT, by James Rigg [Panoguide]

Spin is a very simple and nicely put together application, and if you use it with a lens with a focal length longer than around 35mm, you should get fairly good results. It can output both flat images for printing or QuickTime movies for use on CDs or the web.

Unfortunately however Spin Panorama is unusual in that it does not warp the source images at all, and therefore it cannot be used for stitching pictures shot with wide angle lenses. It is unsurprising then that in my tests it performs badly... I also found that the automatic alignment function didn't work with my pictures (but that could be because the lenses are not appropriate for use with Spin). To top it all, there is a 1000 pixel height limit on the output image, so you might have problems using Spin to create high resolution images for printing on large sheets of paper, or for high resolution CD presentations.

All that Spin is really doing is shunting the images together and blending over the seam. If you have a professional image editing package such as Corel Photo-Paint or Adobe PhotoShop you can of course do this kind of stitching anyway (and Photo-Paint makes it easy and supports QTVR).

The interface may be good but Spin Panorama is sorely let down by a lack of warping capabilities without which it cannot produce sharp high quality images other than with long focal length lenses (>35mm). There are now many free programs that produce much better results than this with similar overall features, and so Spin Panorama cannot be recommended.

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