Camera playtime

Published by neil on September 25th, 2005

I like panoramic images, but have been struggling to find the right tool to help me create them. What I need from a panoramic creation tool:

It needs to be cheap (or free)
It needs to be dead simple because I can’t be arsed fiddling around for hours (plenty of other things to fiddle with)
It needs to generate an image that doesn’t look like a bunch of smaller image strung together in stripey, mismatches hell.

So I’ve been searching in past weeks/months for the right tool. There are a good handful of open source and freeware panorama tools available, but boy are they techie. I don’t want to have to dig graphite out of the ground in order to sketch with a pencil - I also don’t have the tools, skills or time to do so!
After many downloads and a handful (yet far too many) lost hours fiddling, I remembered a small, ugly little app I picked up on special offer and never got around to testing called PanoramaMaker (Arcsoft).

Setting aside it’s UI ugliness (do user interfaces have their own ugly-trees?) it fulfills my criteria perfectly… fast and simple with results that aren’t crap. With a little more fiddling in Photoshop I can get things even better, I’m sure.
Here’s a ten minute job from a bunch of photos taken in a nearby park where we ate our lunch.