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.
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