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I first saw Realviz' Stitcher (3.0 for the Mac)
demonstrated at New York's Mac World Expo. Ken Eyring, Realviz
senior technical sales person, did a great job of putting this
amazing application through its paces.
After watching Ken's demos for nearly an hour, I
returned to Florida feeling confident I could master Stitcher
when my review copy arrived. Confidence overestimated.
Stitcher is an $495 stand-alone application that
can create panoramic images up to 360x360 degrees in
cylindrical, spherical, cubic, planar and VRML formats.
After tangling with the utterly complex Panorama
Tools, the application used by Ken Lyons (see column at
http://www.planetphotoshop.com/jim19.html), I expected
Stitcher to be a walk in the park. And with the basic tutorial,
it sort of was: a nice Romanesque temple with lots of straight
lines and hard textures.
Stitcher uses drag & drop to place elements from
the Image Strip into the Stitching Window. I mastered the
rotate, roll, zoom and stitch commands pretty easily. Then I
came to a "cannot stitch image. Adjust manually." I might still
be adjusting manually if I had not given up and started over.
Oddly enough, my problem image stitched just fine when I started
with it as a base image.
Understanding various formats and the focal
length and other menu controls is vital to using Stitcher in a
masterful fashion. One two-image pano saved as an extremely wide
space of black with the tiny image in its center.
A multi-image construction of my studio shot
from a stationary tripod and using precise angles and rotations
turned out to be a virtual reality strip that inexplicably
cropped tightly when saved.
Stitcher is a fabulous program which takes more
than a few days of study and practice to attain proficiency. In
the coming weeks, I hope to create something that equals the
work of Ken Lyons on his worst day. |