PTGui can stitch several sequential pictures to create a panorama. The tool supports various types of projections, like equirectangular, rectilinear and stereographic, and the possibility of creating not only standard panoramas but also spherical ones (equirectangular) is absolutely one of its best features. The application is not appropriate for inexpert users, as it certainly requires working with various windows and a lot of parameters. However, there are some procedures that can be done automatically with almost no intervention on the part of the user.
You can start by loading the source pictures, and, luckily, the tool supports multiple file types. At this stage, it is important that you provide such data as camera brand, lens type (even fisheye lens are supported), focal lens and crop factor. Good news is that the program can read the data about your camera from the files and there are also three available presets: wide angle, normal lens and tele lens, which means that by choosing one of them, most of the parameters are automatically filled in. Depending on the quality of the taking, mostly how much the images overlap, the application can organize them in a sequence. Yet, if the overlapping areas are not enough, you have the opportunity to add control points manually.
Once the stitching is done, you can proceed to preview the panorama, with the help of the built-in viewer. If you are satisfied with the way the panorama looks, you can then publish it to a web site or save it to a local folder. In this regard, various output formats are allowed, including JPG, TIFF, PSD, PSB and MOV. It is an undisputable advantage that you can save it as a single or various layers.
All in all, it seems to me that PTGui is the best panorama creator around. Although there are other tools of the same type around, none of them lets you gain as much control of the results as PTGui does. Most of them can create rectilinear projections only, something that you can even do from your smartphone as well. Moreover, in spite of the plenty of calculations needed for this sort of tasks, PTGui does the whole thing very quickly, as it uses OpenCL GPU acceleration. I really recommend you to download its trial version, which can be used without any limitations as to time period or features, except for leaving a watermark on the panorama. You should also know that the program is sold in two editions: Standard and Pro.
v9.1.9 [Aug 12, 2011]
- Fix: linked images could get different parameters after optimization
- Fix: 'Assertion Failed' after aligning bracketed images
- Fix: Using Align Images after predefining the panorama geometry (through Align To Grid) did not work well if no control points were found for image 0, because image 0 is by default used as anchor image for optimization. In this case PTGui now chooses a suitable anchor image from the largest cluster and attempts to move the orphaned images with this largest cluster.
- Fix: in Crop Tab, mouse pointer did not change to an arrow when hovering over the crop circle if it was outside the image boundaries
- Fix: after applying a template the 'EV' column in the Image Parameters tab could be empty
- Fix: Generating control points for a rectangular area could create control points overlapping with existing points
- Fix: Holding down the Alt key did not slow down the mouse (Windows only)
- Fix: copying/pasting/saving/loading masks did not function correctly
- Fix: PTGui refused to write Photoshop .psb files wider or taller than 300,000 pixels, aborting with an error message after stitching. The current version will only give a warning message before stitching.
- Fix: Undo did not work correctly when rotating an image in the Control Points/Mask/Crop tabs
- Fix: Publish To Website: selecting 'Use custom template' but not giving a template file name now gives a more descriptive error message
- Fix: mac: unavailable menu items were never greyed out
- Fix: mac: when control+dragging in the panorama editor, if the control key was released before the mouse button, rotation would continue even after releasing the mouse button
- Fix: mac: Ghost Cursor could be positioned incorrectly when hovering over the left image in the Control Points tab
- Fix: Clicking the Remove Excluded Images could crash or hang PTGui
- Fix: Windows: after restarting PTGui popup windows (panorama editor, detail viewer) could be placed invisibly behind the taskbar
- Publish to Website: if Resolution is set to Automatic the output is now limited to 60 megapixels. Larger output is possible by overriding the automatic setting but such a panorama may not be displayed reliably on every computer.
- Optimizer now better keeps any orphaned images together with the rest of the panorama
- Context menu in Source Images tab: added 'Clear Mask' option
- Context menu in Mask tab: added options for copying/pasting/saving/loading/clearing masks
- Mask tab: added copy/paste buttons to the toolbars below the images
- New default file naming option: 'prefix source image folder name'. When used (e.g.) in the batch builder, the project files get the name of the folder containing the source images.
- New menu item and keyboard shortcut for switching between single and dual image display in the Mask tab
- Detail viewer now offers two modes for navigation: 'drag and hold' and 'drag to move'
- New import function for Papywizard data files (in File -> Import menu). Only the yaw and pitch angles are imported, other settings are assumed to be taken from the EXIF data
- Added sensor size data for new cameras
- Bundled dcraw is updated to version 9.10
- PTGui Viewer: can now add custom parameters to the Flash tag, for example to add wmode=transparent. See documentation inside PTGuiViewer.js.
- 'Correct' function is removed from the Source Images tab, since pano12 library is no longer supported
- PTGui for Mac now requires an Intel processor, PowerPC is no longer supported.
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