Go Wide with Digital Panoramas
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After files are imported, the next step is to describe the camera to the application. This is important because as the application creates the panorama, it will correct for the distortion of the lens in order to flatten the image. The plane of an image is more like a bubble than it is flat. To merge images you need to correct for this distortion. To do that you need to know the parameters of the optical path, and that's one of the reasons Panorama Factory's library of more than 100 models of cameras is so important. Figure 6 shows the dialog in which you specify the model of your camera.

Figure 6. Specifying the type of camera.

Another dialog appears in which you specify some image-quality parameters. Generally the defaults are acceptable. The next important decision is what type of panorama you want:

Figure 7. What type of panorama do you want?

Here's where you can specify whether you want a flat image file (a JPEG, for instance) or a QuickTime VR movie as output. If you use QuickTime VR, viewers will be able to scroll around the panorama within a small window. This is very interactive, but it also requires that people who view your images have QuickTime installed.

With the exception of the loading of the images and the specification of the camera (which is stored between sessions), all of these options are the default, so you can simply press Next until Panorama Factory starts building the panorama.

Now the application builds the picture by warping each image, finding the stitch points, blending the image, and doing crop and tune-up work. In this case, the result looks like this:

Figure 8. The completed panorama.

At this point we can save the image as a file and prepare it for print or Web publication.

I've just scratched the surface of what Panorama Factory can do. The wizard simply automates what you can do by hand, while giving full control over each step in the process. And since the complete collection of images is stored at every step, you can go back and fix problems with image alignment.

Panorama Factory is not the only panorama-building software. Camera vendors, like Canon, have their own software. But you need to buy the camera to get it. Photoshop Elements includes a panorama function, but I found that it was slow and did not have the optics compensation features. Panorama Tools, which is freely available on the Web, is highly regarded but has a difficult interface. Photovista Panorama is a competitor of Panorama Factory and is available for both Macintosh and Windows.

Publishing Your Panorama

Now that you have a panoramic image, what can you do with it? What you should realize first is that it is technically just like any other image, though the size and aspect ratios are probably very different. As with any other image, you can crop it and scale it for publication to the Web.

You can also use standard image-adjustment techniques to modify the levels and brightness. Or, if you have a scenic panorama like this one where the horizon slopes from one side to another, you can use an image-editing tool to fix the problem (as described in Hack 66 in Derrick Story's Digital Photography Hacks).

Publishing panoramas on the Web is tricky. If you constrain the width of the image to 800 pixels, your scenic vista will shrink to a thin sliver. One option is to crop the image aggressively to restore a saner aspect ratio. Another option is to export the image to a format like QuickTime VR, which lets users scroll the image interactively. If QuickTime isn't your thing, a Java applet can perform a similar function directly on a JPEG image.

When it comes to printing out your panorama, you can send it to an online print shop or print it yourself, and frame it just as you would a normal picture. I do recommend printing panoramas on at least 8-by-10-inch stock to ensure that you aren't left with just a thin strip of an image.