Panorama Factory

The Panorama Factory by Smoke Sity Design is one of the number of panorama creating programs. It allows creating of cyllindric and spherical panoramas, has a fine tuning option, and auto and fully manual modes.
The interface of the program and the workflow are not too complex and allow all kinds of users to create perfect panorama images. For perfect images auto mode is useful, more complex images can benefit from manual mode.
The workflow is organized in two modes. You can run a wisard that will walk you through in steps and give you clues for what to do at each of them. Once got used to the program you’ll be able to do on your own in the usuall and more traditional way with classic interface. the Panorama Factory help also has step by step instruction for this interface.

The first step is for image import. At the same stage you can rotate images and change their order if needed (there are buttons for this at the upper panel in classic interface). At this stage you can have a look at a histogram.

The Panorama Factory has fully automatic, semi automatic and manual modes, you choose one of them in step 2. The three modes give flexibility - you can let the program to automatically align some of the images and manually set control points for the rest of them, for example.

Then the program will ask you for the focal length of your camera lens. You can choose your camera model from quite a substancial list Panorama Factory has or take the required number from the exif file. And you can always set the program to automatically detect the focal length for you.

Step four asks for the image adjustment (or fine tuning) settings. You can use the automatic fine-tune recommended by the manufacturer or fine-tune the image manually at a later stage. Some automatic settings however can be set by the user - exposure matching and exposure correction and sharpenning. If you have not set correct exposure while shooting or converting from raw, Panorama Factory would manage the task for you. As for the sharpening, an image editor will perform the job better and it’s better turn to this option here only when there’s lack of time.

Next step is for the choice of panorama type and image stitching method. The default settings are ok here and conform with mostly used cases.

Next step is only accessible in manual or semi-manual modes. It’s the setting of control points. The control points in automatic mode are set by the program. Manually you usually can set them with more precision. The program will hint you on wether your control points are good for stitching. It’s done with color dots - blue and green color denotes good control points, yellow and red - bad. One bad control ponts pair can ruin the whole panorama and its best to avoid them.

In my example the automatically stitched panorama had a number of defects, including double objects and visible sims.

Manual stitching had more sucess, although I couldn’t get rid of the horizon line bend all the same.

Step 7 will provide you with a low resolution preview. The rectangle marquees show the images overlaps.

If the quality satisfies you , procede to the next screen where the images will be processed again and the panorama saved to desired format. You can let the program do fine tuning on the way or leave it for later.

Finally the Wisard brings you to the moment when the panorama is ready for export. You can choose between printing and web presentation, the optimization parameters will be different.

Panorama Factory can import the major image formats like jpg, tiff, bmp and psd. It can also extract images out of html and htm pages.
Ready panoramas can be exported to same jpg, bmp, png or psd and some formats that can be used for showing panoramas on the web (.ivr, .mov). The latter require corresponding software to be installed on the computer.
After you are done the program asks you if you want to save the project and in case of agreement all the image files resulted in stitching panorama in Panorama Factory will be saved to the source images directory by default. Dont’t be surprised when you see a bulk of images in the directory four times more than the number of images you had left the previous time.
Altogether it can be said that Panorama Factory having very understandable interface and a good wisard is capable of producing good simless panoramas. I would not trust its autimatic mode very much but semi-autiomatic and manual methods can work very fine.
You can buy Panorama Factory for $79.99 at the corresponding Panorama Factory site.