Realviz Stitcher 5

Panorama stitching software can broadly be split into two groups. There are those such as Photomerge that let you stitch together a few images to produce an ultra-wide-angle view, and then you have applications such as Realviz Stitcher.

Aimed at professionals and serious panographers, it allows you to produce 3D panoramas that put you at the centre of an immersive 360º virtual world.

The most arduous part of the process is manually overlapping shots so the software can match up corresponding details and fit them together.

Stitcher 5’s new automatic stitching feature makes this easy. Tell the program which images to use and it takes over. It sounds too good to be true, but within a few minutes Stitcher 5 created a flawless panorama from 32 images, saving about half an hour’s work.

If you prefer to put your panoramas together yourself, there’s also a new manual method which involves placing control points on corresponding image details. And, of course, there’s the semi-automatic method of approximate manual positioning followed by automatic stitching.

The Stencil tool now works in the stitching window, rather than its own dialogue box, but a more significant improvement is the introduction of support for Photoshop layer masks.

It’s now also much easier to export panoramic files for editing and re-import them prior to rendering a Quicktime Virtual Reality (QTVR) movie or another similar format.

In addition to a new streamlined interface, other enhancements include a new live preview window, the ability to save render presets and support for QTVR scripting. But it’s the automatic stitching that will sell this new version to existing users as well as those considering entering the field.

System requirements:
P4 1GHz or higher
256MB of Ram
100MB hard disk