Product Reviews

Laying your images side by side rarely makes a convincing panorama; there are too many joins, no matter how long you spend smudging them with a clone stamp tool. That's where Stitcher comes in handy, colour balancing the constituent parts and working out where they overlap. Once it has pieced them all together, it renders the result as a panoramic Jpeg, or a QuickTime VR (QTVR) movie ready for saving.

Results are generally very good, although we found some inaccuracies in the output, such as ghosting, where two source images hadn't been positioned precisely on top of one another. This is a small point and you'd have to look pretty closely to spot the slips.

The time it takes to complete a stitch depends on the size of the input and output files. As a guide, we created our panoramas using 2.4MB Jpegs, with the average project being made up from seven source files. On an 800MHz iBook G3 with 640MB of RAM, a panorama of this size rendered as a 7500-pixel-wide Jpeg with minimal

The real strength of Stitcher lies in its QTVR export. The mountain panorama above was produced using 11 source files. At 7500 pixels wide it rendered as a Jpeg in 1 minute 40 seconds, but halving its size and saving as a QTVR more than doubled the render time. That said, it should be a boon for holiday reps or architects looking to produce online guides, particularly as you can add hotspots for navigation.

We have a few issues with the interface. Closing an active file shuts down Stitcher, which is very non-Mac OS X. It also tends to lose track of what you're doing when using the Pan tool. Dragging your image across the screen, and then letting go to pick it up at another point and continue the drag deselects the tool, forcing you to reselect it. Moreover, in the filmstrip panel that holds your source files, the window-resizing handle has been positioned on top of the scroll-down button, forcing you to drag the slider instead.

There's no denying that Stitcher has rough edges. You also only get out what you put in, so be prepared to spend some time fine-tuning things before the final render. That aside, it's a very accomplished piece of software, it's also versatile and a joy to use. It's a shame Realviz has chosen to price it well beyond its worth, as otherwise we would recommend it wholeheartedly. If we hint strongly enough, perhaps a 'lite' version will be released with Jpeg-only export options at a more sensible price.