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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 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. |