The Panorama Factory 5.3

The Panorama Factory from Smoky City Design, LLC is a panoramic stitching program for Windows 98 / ME / NT / 2000 / XP / 2003 / x64 / Vista. It creates high-quality panoramas from a set of overlapping digital images. The Panorama Factory transforms (warps) the images so that they can be joined seamlessly into panoramas whose fields of view can range up to 360 degrees. The Panorama Factory creates images that rival those made by rotational and swing-lens panoramic cameras. Not only can The Panorama Factory facilitate creation of immersive VR worlds, it also provides features for the fine-art panoramic photographer who wishes to work from ordinary 35mm images or images captured with a digital camera.

Features and capabilities

The Panorama Factory provides a rich set of features:

Easy to use:
• Runs on Windows and Mac.
• A Wizard helps you create new stitching projects with just a few mouse clicks.
• Automatic detection of focal length.
• Detection of camera rotation and tilt.
• Easy rotation of imported images.
• Includes a library of over 800 digital camera models including digital SLRs.
• Available in Catalan, Chinese-Simplified†, Chinese-Traditional†, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese†, Norwegian-Bokmal (63%*), Polish, Russian, Slovak (81%*), Spanish (98%*), Turkish (24%*). Online help is "bilingual" (commands, buttons, etc. in the local language with explanations in English).
* Translation percent complete as of January 5, 2009. Other translations are 100% complete.
† Chinese and Japanese language translations require the x64, m32 or Mac Edition.
• Lets you save user preferences for all applicable dialogs.

Attention to image-quality issues:
• Includes automatic and manual "de-ghosting" tools.
• Automatically or manually correct barrel distortion and brightness falloff.

Support for immersive virtual reality:
• Output to QTVR, IVR, PTViewer or HTML image map format.
• Use hotspots to create virtual tours by hyperlinking from one VR image to another.
• Import existing VR images in order to edit and re-export them in other formats.
• Create web pages from pre-defined templates or templates you create yourself.
• Create thumbnail index web pages.

True full color support:
• Accepts 24-bit and 45-bit color images (15 bits each for red, green and blue).
• Supports color managed workflows including conversion to working color space.
• Reads and writes Windows BMP, JPEG, TIFF and PNG images.
• Exports to layered Photoshop image format.
• O ptionally maintains full 45-bit data until final image output at 24-bits.
• Can work from positive or negative images.
• Includes a convenient and intuitive color correction tool.
• FreewareTrims images from negative strips with a semi-automatic corner finding tool.

Fast, high-quality image processing engine:
• Focal-length refinement.
• Image overlap from 1-99%.
• Automatic image alignment with manual override.
• Bicubic image sampling is used to maintain image quality.
• Image rescaling with Lanczos2 filtering – perfect for creating thumbnail images.
• Multi-threaded execution on multi-processor systems, including multi-core systems (requires Windows XP, 2003 or Vista).
• 64-bit processor support (requires the x64 Edition of Windows XP, 2003 or Vista).
• Batch processing version available for bulk panorama renderings.

Customer support:
• Printable user guide in PDF format.
• Troubleshooting guide and frequently asked questions.
• Comprehensive online help pages.
• Dedicated support forum.
• Free updates for minor versions (e.g.: V5.1 is a free update for owners of V5.0.)

Project-file organization:
• Allows you to change intermediate images without starting over.
• Enables archival storage with reduced disk space.

Several of these features make The Panorama Factory a natural complement to film (negative and slide) scanners. In fact, even if you never use its panoramic stitcher, The Panorama Factory is great for extracting and color correcting frames from negative strips.

What's new in V5.3?
1. A new edition, the Mac Leopard Edition is now available. The old Mac edition has been renamed the Mac Legacy Edition. The Leopard delivers improved stitching speed on multi-processor systems (including multi-core systems) by performing image computations in parallel. The new Mac Leopard Edition requires Mac OS X 10.5 or newer. If you are running OS X 10.3 or 10.4 you must use The Mac Legacy Edition.
2. Support for Windows Imaging Component (WIC) has been added to the m32 and x64 Editions. WIC supports a variety of image file formats, notably many camera RAW formats, through plug-ins that are available from camera manufacturers and third parties. We do not provide WIC plug-ins, but will take advantage of any WIC plug-ins that are installed on your computer. Image files formats that are available through WIC are automatically recognized by The Panorama Factory and are listed in the Files of type drop down list on the Import Images dialog box. For more information about WIC and for a list of available plug-ins, refer to “Windows Imaging Component” in the online help Chapter 9, “Image file formats”.
3. 76 new cameras were added to the camera library in V5.3.
4. The following trouble reports are corrected in V5.3:
TR 1158 Meta keys (SHIFT, CONTROL, ALT, COMMAND) sometimes do not work on a secondary Mac keyboard
TR 1166 Abnormal termination using some non-Apple keyboards
TR 1486 Abnormal termination upon choosing the Crop command