Do you ever wonder how photographers create wide panoramas of amazing vistas or landscapes? Most top photogs have special lenses and other camera gear that cost tens of thousands of dollars. For the rest of us that want to create a similar effect with a group of photos on a Mac, that is where Photostitcher comes into the picture.
Overview
Photostitcher for Mac by Teorex has an easy to use method to import photos with just a few clicks. Tap the plus button once and you are then able to select pictures from anywhere on your Mac. Once inside of the app, the photos are displayed in a scrollable list with large previews.
To start the process of stitching a few photos, click on the play button next to the crop option. This brings up a window asking which format you would like to stitch the images with.
There are six options to choose from under warp surface that include, plane, cylindrical, spherical, fisheye and stereographic. To create a simple panoramic photo, select the spherical option. Clicking on ok continues the relatively quick process of stitching at about 45 seconds. If your original images are flat, the warp surface to choose is spherical.
If your images are anything other than flat, definitely experiment with the warp surface style options. This is where the fun of Photostitcher comes into the picture. In less than a minute for each rough panoramic, selecting alternate warp surfaces will result in unexpected photographic serendipity.
Cropping the rough panoramic photos is made really easy. The cropping option is always overlaid over the image. All I had to do was place the box over what I wanted and click once on the crop icon.
The app deals really well with shadows, lines in concrete, people and objects that are placed at angles. My photos of a pool event on a bright day with people moving around yielded a panoramic photo with no discernible ghosting. Smartphone apps that create panoramic photos have not been able to produce pictures this clear.
The stitching process is smart enough to put the photos together without each imported picture needing sequential numbers. As long as the images have about a 30% overlap, it will automatically figure out where each picture fits.
Verdict
Photostitcher worked well with just a few photos in the queue. I found that stitching more than six photos with a greater than a 30% overlap kept the stitching progress window open for more than what seemed like a few minutes.
The indication window has a continuously forward rotating progress bar. It would be nice if the progress bar showed a percentage instead. This app was tested on a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.53Ghz running the newest Mac OS X 10.7.5 with 4GB of ram. While this MBP is no slouch, I am sure a Mac Pro or a MacBook Pro with a quad-core i7 processor would stitch the photos faster.
If you want the stitching process to go a lot faster, having only three photos in queue was the sweet spot. Consumer level cameras can produce wide photos, so three should be good enough to create a superb panoramic.
Most modern consumer cameras and smartphones come with a panoramic stitching option built-in. However, the built-in stitching software on those cameras along with what is available on the newest smartphones are almost always unable to stitch photos without creating contrast banding or other visual errors.
The consumer grade major brand name camera I purchased a little over a year ago did not come with a panoramic option like my other camera did. So having this handy app from Teorex helped me to create share-worthy panoramas.
Rating: 4/5[rating:4]
Price: Currently $19.99 from the Mac App Store or a demo version from their website. The demo version does not allow you to save the final image.
Pros:
- Easy to use and import photos.
- Simple cropping tool.
- Multiple warp surfaces create unique panoramic pictures.
Cons:
- Progress bar should show a percentage.
- There is no cancel button after the stitching process has started. Hitting command + period stopped the process.
- It uses all available CPU processing which makes other apps come to a crawl.
*Note: The above review was commissioned by the developer in accordance with our app review policy, and has been written in an objective, unbiased fashion.
