Labs

Some digital cameras have a panorama feature and, with a bit of skill and lots of patience, you can turn any series of overlapping photographs into a panorama. Without special tools, though, that panorama will be an ordinary graphics file such as a JPEG or a TIFF. COOL 360 lets you make panoramas irrespective of

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what camera you have. It even lets you create virtual reality-type panoramas that you can pan around at will.

Just take a series of shots, panning your camera right or left between each one and making sure there's some overlap. Take a super-wide angle series of photographs or the full 360-. Don't worry too much about making sure each shot lines up horizontally as COOL 360 will sort out any slight errors.

Put the pictures on your PC and tell COOL 360 which photographs to include in your panorama and whether it's super-wide angle or 360-. It will create a first pass that you can fine-tune by hand, but in our tests we didn't need to alter it. The software hid the joints well and will even make a passable job of merging neighbouring photographs if they don't have an overlap. Finally, you can export your panorama in various formats, including ordinary graphics files and QuickTime movies.