PTGui

PTGui is a software solution designed for those who want to create both small and large scale panoramas.

With it you can load hundreds of pictures and merge them into a single impressive shot. PTGui displays a user-friendly interface and provides a simple three step process to creating the panorama. You first load the images, align them and finally export the new panoramic shot.

PTGui displays the source images and allows you to sort them automatically or manually. You can reverse their order and replace a certain image with a better one. While the photos are loaded, the application creates the control points and enables you to reposition them if you feel that they are incorrectly placed.

The application automatically aligns the images and after it finishes to do so, it opens up the ‘Panorama Editor’ which displays a preview of how the final picture can look like.

Since panoramas come in all shapes and sizes, PTGui offers you a large number of projections that you can apply to your image in order to best represent a 3D environment that is flattened when it is captured using the camera. You get to choose from ‘Rectilinear’, ‘Cylindrical’, ‘Equirectangular’, ‘Circular’, ‘FullFrame’, ‘Stereographic’, ‘Mercator’ and ‘Vedutismo’.

Each of the projections is created to offer you a different type of image, from a simple 360 degree linear one to a “Little Planet panorama”. A great thing about PTGui and using these projections is that once they are applied, the application allows you to drag the composite along the vertical and horizontal axes which enables you to experiment with the perspective and distortions.

PTGui is a very powerful tool that is designed for both hobbyists and professional photographers who want complete control over how their panoramic shots are being aligned, merged and exported. It does eat up a lot of your system resources when stitching but that depends on how big your project is.

With the above to consider and much more to discover, it’s safe to say that PTGui is by all means a complete solution to creating panoramic photos.