PanaVue ImageAssembler

Image assembler makes stitching images together a simple task. It takes upon itself the job of compensating for shifts in camera position, errors in exposure and other problems. The results are excellent.

Optional use of user positioned flags to indicate how neighboring images are related. Output in varying formats. The ability to save the characteristics of your lens. Good support and updates.

It gets a bit confusing shifting around a large number of source images on a large stitching project.

Of all the popular image stitching progams available for MS Windows I have found Panavue to be the most able to do the basic job of stitching with least artifacts. The difficult part of stitching seems to be correcting for both lens characteristics and our human foible of moving slightly during picture taking. Panavue provides "flags" to control where images are forced to match, and that makes quite a difference. It also accomodates camera tilt, frame to frame. The visual editing part of Panavue is rather good, not excellent, but easy to use and effective when we need it. Original image size is not a problem. I just don't understand why some other programs make life so difficult with editing and pinpointing just where we want a stitch to match. Required picture overlap can be minimal, typically 10% or so in my work. I consider Panavue to be highly effective, and sufficiently flexible that good stitches result from even casually taken pictures. A little learning curve is involved. The price is good for what we receive.

Described above. Able to deal with lens effects, camera movement, and camera tilt. Editing is easy, manual control is good.

Camera lens detection is a bit loose, but then this is a data inversion problem mixed with other distortions (camera movement). The matter of choosing lenses does need some work.

Almost all those available for free or trial for MS Windows. A site with a good set of tests and comparisons is http://www.panaoguide.com

Rapid response to a reported bug, new version appeared with the fix.