Panorama Programs - AutopanoPro?

Hi all

My girlfriend & colleagues made me a cool birthday present: They want to buy a panorama/stitching program for me. I'm of course very happy about that. I've used the demos of Calico panorama and AutopanoPro so far. AutopanoPro seems to be great. Am I missing something? Is there a better program for less money out there waiting to be found?

I've heard & read a couple of times about "PanoTools" - what exactly is it, and how does it work? And what does/doesn't it do what Autopano doesn't/does?

Thanks!

Basil

I use Autopano Pro, and have been very happy with it. I've never comapred it any other programs however, so I've unable to say if they're a better program out there or not.

I also use Autopano Pro and it works fine for me. I've never used anything else so I can't compare.

I'll jump on the Autopano Pro bandwagon also, I have been using it for the last six months and it works great. I challenge people to find where the photos overlap and it simply cannot be done (as long as you have taken the photos correctly to begin with). Also the interface is very intuitive to use. If you look around my website you'll see a number of panorama's that were stiched with APP.

Thanks for your replies, everybody. Looks like everybody likes it so much that they don't try anything else.

Basil

Me too think the same.

Just to get another view posted, I have had very good luck and wonderful results with Panorama Maker 4. I have used it for 6 - 7 months and am very satisfied.

Autopano Pro here also, even after comparing it to photoshop cs3's auto align/blend.
cs3 does a decent job if you're talking about panoramas that contain i'd say a max of 10 photo's, after that Autopano Pro is much better.

Just to throw yet another view in Basil, there is a pretty good free tool available in Autostitch. It's university deveolped, and I think the algorithm was purchased for use in Autopano Pro. I've used it several times and it does a great job of aligning and blending. I don't know how it is with parallax error, or other more complex problems, but it's free, so it's worth a shot.

Thanks for your replies, everybody. I did have a look at Autostitch, but it seems to be PC only (and I can't tell my girlfriend & friends "well, I got something else for free, please give me some other birthday present", right? ). In any case, I'm looking forward to having my first pano stitched without anything written over it due to demo mode.

Basil

Check out PTGui for another outlook.