Cool 360
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Updated: 20 Sep 1999 at 17:00 GMT,
by James Rigg
[Panoguide]
This review refers to version 1.0
The thing that hits you about Cool 360 is the graphically rich interface which is not only simple to use but at the same time gives you a tremendous amount of control over your panoramas. Unlike some automatic stitching applications this one also allows you to create a 'project' and save to disk all the settings you have used for stitching a panorama from a particular sequence.
There are various features of Cool 360 that distinguish it from the crowd: it allows you to adjust the perspective of individual images to compensate for camera tilt (in theory therefore the whole sequence could be tilted down I guess). Also completed panoramas can be embedded in MS Office documents, saved in a self-executing format (the viewer is embedded in the file) and emailed. In addition to brightness and contrast controls there is a colour (hue) adjustment.
Although Cool 360 does not support fisheye lenses it does support lenses with focal lengths down to 13mm which is more than enough for most of us.
After all this praise it is unfortunate that I should have to now say that Cool 360 is let down by two things: (i) the preview images are very small and you cannot zoom in so as to be able to accurately manually align them and (ii) the automatic image alignment seems to come close but not quite close enough to a perfect stitch. The performance tests indicate to me that Cool 360 is capable of some great things but that these two critical factors let it down and make achieving high quality images difficult (I will stop short of saying impossible). Given the tremendous amount of control in the package some form of blending control might also find a good home here too.
If these shortfalls are corrected, perhaps in the next release, Cool 360 stands a good chance of beating the competition. And let's not forget, this is the first release. Keep your eye on this product!