Product Reviews

If your business is producing 360 immersive panoramas, there are a number of options available that enable you to stitch the individual images into an all-encompassing virtual view, but few manage to match up to RealViz Stitcher's ease of use and versatility.

With this new release, RealViz has extended the application's reach in both directions. A new Automatic Stitch command does all the hard work for novice panographers and those without the patience to manually align the images. Meanwhile, experts and perfectionists will welcome the introduction of support for Photoshop layer masks, a much improved system for round-tripping panorama files for external editing, a manual stitching mode, and support for QTVR scripting.

RealViz has also revamped and streamlined the Stitcher interface, providing more space for assembly and editing in the full-screen stitching window. The tool strip has been replaced by five buttons that sit at the top-left for loading and saving, stitching, alignment, equalization and rendering.

The image strip has been replaced with a dock-like thumbnail strip that magnifies when you hover over it, albeit in a rather disappointingly jerky and very un-Mac OS X sort of way.

However, without doubt, the show-stopping feature of this release is automatic stitching. Whenever a program makes a claim to do something automatically that has previously taken a degree of skill and patience, it deserves to be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. In this case, such doubts would be misplaced. We loaded in 30 images from a panorama previously produced in Stitcher 4, hit the Automatic Stitch button and sat back prepared for, at best, a half-baked attempt that would require a good deal of manual tidying. Within a few minutes, Stitcher 5 produced a flawless result that couldn't have been bettered.

Yes, there were artefacts where subject movement had occurred, but you'd get that with manual positioning of the files. With very little effort, this feature gets you past the most time-consuming and laborious part of the process. This feat was even more impressive, as our test panorama had duplicate images shot with bracketed exposure settings.

At the opposite end of the scale, Stitcher now offers

ADVERTISEMENT

a manual stitching mode that will appeal to panographers who prefer a greater degree of control over the process. Manual stitching involves placing control points on corresponding locations in overlapping images, and is a technique that's proved effective in other stitching applications such as PanoTools.

The Stencil tool, used to crop out artefacts in overlapping images caused by subject movement between shots, has been slightly improved. Editing no longer takes place in a dialog box, but in the Stitching window itself. However, there are no new tools and the Polygonal Stencil remains crude.

Rather than add sophisticated image editing features to Stitcher, RealViz has extended the degree of Photoshop support, making it easier to swap files back and forth between the two programs. Version 4 introduced export of layered PSD files; this time around, it's layer masks. This is a smart development strategy. The Stencil tool is there for undemanding tasks and those who want a quick fix. For everything else, you can go to Photoshop, create a layer mask and bring the edited image back in to Stitcher.

The Panorama-conversion feature, which can be used, say, to export the six faces of a cubic projection to PSD files for editing prior to rendering, now allows you to re-import the files to Stitcher, where the panorama can be viewed in the stitching window prior to rendering to QTVR or another format.

RealViz has also improved the Render Setup dialog, which now has context-sensitive choices dependent on the chosen file format. There's also a new Settings Management pane that allows you to save and load render settings presets, a long overdue feature given the complexity of the process. Meanwhile, a new QTVR scripting button lets you automatically pan QTVRs on opening, disable panoramas after a given date, and add a logo graphic and link URL.

Rendering high-resolution QTVR panoramas is time consuming, and Stitcher has added a new Live preview window to its already ample preview facilities. The Live preview provides either a cylindrical, cubic, or spherical view of the panorama and updates to reflect changes. This is a welcome addition, but some consolidation of the multiple preview tools would also have been good. Anyone not familiar with the difference between a Quick preview, a QuickTime preview and a Live preview will find the situation confusing. Stitcher would also benefit from an automated way of generating a fast, low-resolution QuickTime preview as an alternative to the current slow, full-resolution offering.

Despite that small criticism, Stitcher remains the most capable tool available for creating panoramas in QTVR and other formats. The price puts it pretty much beyond the reach of all but professionals, but Stitcher Express provides a good subset of these tools at a much lower cost.