Mike Franklin posted recently talking of Panorama-Stitching software. Some of you may recall back in January that I talked about the excellent freebie software that Hewlett Packard supplies with its printers. I'm not the only one to comment on the quality of the software Hewlett Packard provide - it's far better now it's Universal and it even has a proper Mac UI (which is better than can be said over other more costly applications...)

For the price, you really can't complain. You surrender all control over the images to the software, once you've ordered them, but it doesn't do all that bad a job. (See the end of the post for comparison images).

DoubleTake, on the other hand, is a pretty comprehensive app - it supports RAW files unlike the HP software (which I guess is to be expected) however I'd recommend working with 16-bit TIFFs as whilst it's certainly not unforgivably slow with the NEFs I dragged into it, it's obviously far faster to work with TIFFs (not to mention you'll have white balance etc sorted too!).

The ability to set a fish-eye setting to the image to get them to align is handy, as is the ability to set the focal length. The 'Align' does exactly what is says on the tin, 360º panoramas are possible, and whilst you can save as JPG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, PNG, PDF, you can also save the panorama as a QuickTime VR and a DoubleTake 'document' which allows you to save the panorama without losing the ability to come back and re-edit it at a future date. One feature I didn't get a a chance to test (as inkjet ink is still too pricey) is one added in the recent 2.1 update: Poster Printing - DoubleTake now can split your images into several pages for printing on A4, allowing you to re-construct the picture after using up copious amounts of ink (read more about the feature on the DoubleTake site)

All in all, DoubleTake is a neat app. Sure, for some people the free software will work for their needs. But if you're interested in having more manual control, and more export options, you really should head over to the developer's site and download a demo - I give it a definite thumbs-up. DoubleTake is €16.95 excluding VAT and requires Mac OS X 10.4. Download details for the Hewlett Packard software can be found here (under Step 3).

Samples:

• Comparison of panoramas created by DoubleTake and HP Photosmart Stitch (1.3MB PDF)
• QuickTime VR created by DoubleTake (2.20MB MOV)
• HP-created version on Flickr
• DoubleTake-created version on Flickr

Tags: Software, Mac