Todays' Stitching Software is more powerful than ever before. A very evolutionary process created some tools or features and performance that one would not have expected some years back.
My personal history of software I used over the years (in sequence):
- Panoweaver (Windows and Mac, fisheye only)
- Panoramafactory (Windows only, flat)
- Autopano Pro 1.x (Windows)
- PTMac (MAC only, similar to PTGui)
- PTGui (Windows and Mac, only reason to stop using it is the missing Linux version)
- Autopano Pro 2.0 (Windows, MAC, Linux)
I dont compare the applications with each other because I was using them at different times and each software had its feature(s) that made me using it for a longer period and there was a reason to move on (at that time, it might be different situation today though).VR/Fisheye based work:I stopped using Panoweaver and moved to PTMac because PW was not very flexible and only perfectly leveled fisheye shots would turn into a good VR and it was expensive to update to newer versions. I moved on to PTGui because most of my workflow was on Windows not on MAC.Flat panoramas:I started with Panoramafactory which was the first (Windows) stitching software I found, that allowed at least a half decent automatic control point creation. It failed with large panoramas (memory problem). I moved on to Autopano Pro because the stitching results were better without major control point cleanup. I started using PTGui because I eventually used it for VR work and it does a really great job, even for very handheld'ish and uneven shots. I still use it on Windows, but I use Autopano Pro now (again) because it runs on Linux (and I am migrating my complete workflow to Linux now).Today:I upgraded to Autopano Pro 2.0 (at a update price of 39.- Euro) and started it using the last few days. An amazing improvement of performance and quality since the last time I used 1.4. Thanks to the Autopano Team for creating a tool that runs under Linux. I will post some real life examples and results the new few days. I am currently feeding Autopano Pro with Mamiya ZD files (adding to huge panorama files).
Autopano Pro Website: www.autopano.net
