[thelist] panoramic views

[Chris Cothrun]

> I want to glue some photographs together and then be
> able to view them on the web as a continuous
> panorama. Anyone care to recommend software for
> that?

A nice cross platform toolset is Panotools. It does 
more than stitch images, it corrects for various 
lens distortions and color matches images in case 
your digicam is unable to lock exposure across 
several images. Since it is a rather low level 
tool, several applications have sprung up for 
working with it.

Hugin  (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) is a free 
(open source) cross platform tool for panotools. 
Despite being a little rough around some edges due 
to ongoing development, it is perfectly useable to 
stitch images.

PTGui (http://www.ptgui.com/) and PTAssembler 
(http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm) are both 
high quality shareware PC apps to work with 
panotools. I've used PTGui on several occasions to 
produce very high quality panoramas with ease.

> Gluing the pics together is one thing, but what is
> it that allows a panorama to be viewed as a
> continuous 360degree sweep that you can go round and
> around in? That must be a plugin I guess. Is there a
> standard or most popular one of these?

As others have mentioned, the QT plugin is the most 
popular. 

Panotools includes options for producing images for 
the QT plugin. It also has a fast java applet that 
does a very nice job of duplicating the QT  
funcionality with the added benefit that your 
viewers don't have to have the plugin installed 
(they do need a java VM, but even the old Microsoft 
VM works fine).

Have fun with the panorama!Chris