Panorama Factory
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Updated: 21 Oct 2004 at 1:03 GMT,
by Theresa Zittritsch
This review is for the lastest version as of 10/20/04 version 3.3
And the only feature I'm using is to create a flat panorama image (not a 360 degree VR kind of view).
But for what I'm using it for, I have to mimic the editors comments on this tool. Versus the other tools I've used, this tool is a fantastic buy. It has automatically stitched some challenging images that more expensive products I've trial tested failed to do. It's faster than any other tool I've used, and I've trial tested quite a few now (5 8MP images took just a couple of minutes for what seems to be a perfect stitch on my 3000xp machine). It's also very easy to follow the methodology and flow with the built-in wizard. The only shortcoming is it's inability to do mosaic stitching (multi-rows plus multi-colums at the same time), but for the price, I can hardly complain as most of my images are single height right now.
But I'm crossing my fingers and hoping to see a future version with multi-rows so I can play with some super-huge images to make high resolution posters from.
Great software, get a copy, you will not be dissapointed!
Theresa
Rating:
Updated: 6 Jan 2001 at 5:00 GMT,
by James Rigg
[Panoguide]
This review is refers to version 2.2
If I had to sum up Panorama Factory 2.2 in a single word it would simply be "wow". When I reviewed the freeware version 1.6 I was impressed, but I had reservations about ease of use and performance. Panorama Factory 2.2 adds some very well written documentation and help files, a very easy to understand project wizard and improvements to just about every dialogue box. Plus it will now generate IVR files for the ISeeMedia Zoom viewers as well as QuickTime VR movies.
And guess what... it's not just easier to use and more feature-rich... it performs very well too. Preliminary tests show that Panorama Factory performs at least as well as the best of the stitching programs reviewed on panoguide.com. In places small amounts of blurring or ghosting appear, but this tends to be at the extreme top or bottom of the panorama (so to be expected) or in areas where the subject moved (so adjusting the blending area often resolves the problem). In fact, Panorama Factory is almost unique in offering fine control over blending - if a moving object (e.g. a person walking along) features on a seam, you just adjust the position and width of the blend area.
If you don't want to use the project wizard, or if the automatic stitching has a problem which you need to manually tweak, you can quit the wizard and switch to the "classic" interface. This too has been substantially improved and is easier to work with, although some users will prefer to use the wizard. Having said that there's no excuse for not producing good results with Panorama Factory 2.2 - you really do get the impression the developers have worked hard to make it very easy to use without compromising on controls at any stage.
Still the most interesting thing about Panorama Factory is its "fine tuning" capability. Most software allows you to adjust lens settings within certain boundaries and perhaps modify blending settings. Panorama Factory goes further than this: after adjusting the position and width of the blend area, you can then fine tune the blend by adding additional warping in certain "tiles" across the blend. This fine level of control means that you should be able to eliminate all ghosts from your images and compensate for inaccuracies caused by, for example, parallax or a rectilinear lens that exhibits convex or concave distortion.
There is a few things that Panorama Factory cannot do: multi-row stitching; mosaics; spherical panoramic pictures. But maybe those will come along in a future release.
Panorama Factory 2.2 produces great pictures quickly and easily whilst giving you the possibility of manually adjusting and controlling any step of the stitching process. It will happily handle huge images and output high quality panoramic pictures for printing or web, plus simplify the process of scaling the image to a specific size for web or print plus create a thumbnail image for you. It now allows you to create ISeeMedia Zoom format IVR panoramas as well as QTVRs. Panorama Factory is now a very powerful and feature-rich panoramic stitcher.