The Panorama Factory 5.2 m32 Edition

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.

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 (incomplete translation), Chinese-Traditional, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian (incomplete translation), Italian, Polish, Russian, Slovak (incomplete translation), Spanish. Online help is "bilingual" (commands, buttons, etc. in the local language with explanations in English). Chinese 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.
- Optionally 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.
- Trims 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 V5.2?

1. Stitching speed is improved on Mac, bringing it closer to the (single-threaded) performance of the Windows Editions.
2. Japanese, Norwegian and Turkish translations were added.
3. as of June 12, 2008, some translations are incomplete. Please refer to Features and capabilities for percent completion numbers of the various translations.
4. 99 new cameras were added to the camera library.
5. When exporting to QTVR format, The Panorama Factory now automatically converts the projection to cubic or cylindrical if it can determine that one projection will produce a significantly smaller output file than the other. Otherwise, it will convert spherical panoramas to cubic and leave cylindrical panoramas unchanged. However, cubic projection is always used if you have selected "Add top and bottom caps to saved image" on the QTVR settings dialog box.