Stitcher 5

Creating panoramas and 3D environments from collections of photographs is a tricky job if you do it manually. Stitcher aims to make this process much easier. If your images are decent-ish, version 5 will help you do the job in just four clicks of your mouse.

Load in your images and they’ll appear in a stream along the bottom of your screen. Click Auto Stitch, and each image will be analysed for overlapping pixels and organised into a panorama. The Align button straightens the panorama and the Equalise button will balance the exposure to produce a seamless image.

The final panorama can then be rendered as a QuickTime, VRML, or Shockwave file, or a single large image, which is useful if you want to add effects or just to create a large picture from several images. For greater interactivity, you can even add clickable hotspots, which allow you to create interactive displays.

Of course the real test of a package of this nature is what happens when the automatic functions can’t cope. This can happen when images don’t have enough overlap, are too similar, or contain moving objects.

But worry not. If problems with automatic stitching do occur, you can easily place images manually instead. It is also possible to create masks in Photoshop (or directly in Stitcher) and use them to remove unwanted detail.

Stitcher remains an effective and easy-to-use photo manipulation package. Simple.