Autopano Pro

Autopano Pro is a program, as its title suggests, that intends to make the panorama making process as automatic as possible. The success of such intention can be provided by good planning and appropriate settings.
You can plan starting from the import of images. The images can be chosen manually or you can specify a folder and Autopano Pro will automatically check it for panoramic images at every opening. You set the guidelines for it though through a browse folder dialogue window.

As you see, the detection of panoramas can be fully automatic - the program will scan the specified folder every time you launch it. With the auto detection unchecked you just launch the detection manually.
The detection itself has preference settings, too, of course.
General settings will affect the performance. To make it better it’s best to choose the temporary files folder outside system area and allow Autopano Pro to use substantial cash.
Optimization default parameters are set for optimum balance between quality and speed and are good for a start.

The most important, to my mind, are Detection Settings - different settings affected the result very much.

When I first opened the folder with test images (default detection settings) Autopano detected a 4 images and 2 images panoramas but did not put all 6 images into one.

After ‘force all images into panorama’ option was checked (other settings are still default) it turned out a mess - the unfit images were inserted into the middle of other four and blended so.

Only after some fiddling with the settings (including the setting of quality and all algorithms to maximum) something consistent appeared.

With the last image a bit tilted, though, the final panorama had a visible flaw, not removable by later editing:

When a potential panorama is detected in the folder it appears on the right and, after pressing the edit button you enter edit area where it is possible to fine-tune the panorama by adjusting a set of its characteristics.

The Edit mode allows the change of panorama mode (spherical, cylindrical, and planar modes). You align the panorama anew and set another central point for it. It’s possible to crop, set verticals and, and auto level. Same screen gives you the opportunity to adjust color in panorama, including levels, tone mapping, and even HDR. But the most important of all, as I think, is the control points editor.

As you press the control points editor button the panorama preview appears with white numbered ovals and color-coded rectangles between them, all in a net of red lines. The ovals show the number of the image, rectangles give information on the link RMS and number of control points. Red lines represent links between images. All of this gives a good visualized picture of image connections. A good panorama will have only green rectangles. Orange and red ones, if they appear, notify of the necessity to edit links.
You can edit link individually or choose several of them at once and proceed to control points editing.
The control points are also coded with the same three colors - green for good ones, orange - acceptable, red - bad. The program gives you the opportunity to remove or add control points in a certain area but the place within this area where a link will be placed is defined by the algorithm. Apart form simple placement of control points (the parameters defining this placement can be set in preferences) there’s the placement of CPs after geometrical analysis.
After all editing was performed, bad links deleted, you can optimize your panorama and it will be recalculated with new adjustments made and new control points taken into account.
The resulted panoramas can be saved as jpg, png, psd, and tiff files. This is specified in the Options (where you also choose the destination folder) and is done automatically after rendering. Out of edit screens you only can save panorama in pano mode.
Autopano Pro doesn’t allow any export for web.
The Program help is placed on its site in the form of a Wiki article and is quite explanatory and well organized.
Autopano Pro can be bought at http://www.autopano.net/ for quite a reasonable price of 99 Euro.