14 DAY TRIAL // It is widely known and accepted that Macs are great for any sort of multimedia work. And 2D imaging is one of the domains where it excels. Whether you work for a big company or from home, if your job description includes working with photos, chances are you are going to love this program.
Make panoramas easy Double take is a tool designed to help you create huge panoramas. There are two ways you can get a good panorama. One is taking the picture yourself with a professional camera that can handle a panorama. The other is using computer software to stitch together two or more photos in such a way as to be seam free.
Working with good pictures If the pictures you are using were taken with a tripod, by someone who knew what they were doing, combining them is child's play. If, however, they were not taken using a tripod, the perspective is not the same in all of them and they have different exposure and Isometry settings, you are in for a very long and bumpy ride... Unless you use Double Take, that is.
If you drag two or more pictures that you want to use to create a panorama, this program analyzes them and moves them, fiddles with the seam placement and sharpness and usually produces a very good result within a few seconds. If the initial pictures were good enough, you probably won't even spot the seams without looking really hard, and even then, fine tuning them is a snap.
Working with bad pictures If the two pictures were taken using different angles and the perspective is very different between them, it will take longer, but Double Take gives results that are far better than those you would get in professional image editing applications in twice the time.
Using the program revolves around adjusting the seams between the photos. Seams can be moved about by selecting one end and dragging left or right (for a vertical seam) or up and down (for a horizontal seam). You can tilt and slant the seams about as much as you like, until you get the best possible placement for the seam.
After the seam is in position, there will usually be elements that differ in the two pictures drawing attention to it. You can further adjust the seam by fine tuning the distance over which the two pictures are blended into each other. At the very lowest, there is no blend and the seam is hard and very obvious; at the very highest, the area around the seam is very blurry and often you can see the same element in both the pictures, giving you a sensation of double vision. Naturally, the ideal setting is somewhere in the middle, and since each end of the seam can have a different blend area, you can have a seam that is very sharp on one end and very soft at the other.
10% inspiration, 90% perspiration While the tools are very simple to use, it is the ease and speed with which you can manipulate them that makes this such a good program.
If the perspectives differ too greatly, or you have lines that intersect the seam at a straight angle but differ slightly in each picture, you can use the fisheye tool to distort the image a little and hopefully make them easier to fit. You can apply either vertical or horizontal fisheye, and adjust focal length manually.
If you have images that have different exposure settings, the program has a auto match tool that will do its best to make them the same, and as always, you can manually adjust the different settings.
Once you get the perfect seam, just lock it in place so you don't accidentally break it. And if you're working with many files, you can quickly jump from seam to seam using the keyboard, so that you don't forget any.
The Good Extremely easy to get a quality panorama in the shortest time.
The Bad Can't do anything much other than stitch panoramas together and the adjustment tools provided aren't that good.
The Truth A very specialized tool for doing one thing only. But it does it very very well. If you are a photographer or someone who edits images for a living this should be right up your alley.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
