Making Your Own Panoramas
You can turn a series of snapshots into a panorama with easy to use software. Both commercial and free, open source alternatives are available.
To learn more about how to shoot a set of snapshots suitable for making a panorama, see our beginner's shooting guide. Also see our guide to making polar reprojections of the panoramas.
Click the picture to see a larger version
Software for Creating Panoramas
The software listed here will take your snapshots and turn them into panoramic pictures. Panoramas are made by finding identifiable points in the overlapping areas of your pictures. These are known as control points. The software then "stretches" your pictures so all of the control points in the overlapping areas align with their counterparts.
Some software will automatically identify control points. The panorama rendering software must have at least a few control points for every pair of adjacent snapshots.
You might already have the software you need. Check the CD that came with your digital camera. Some cameras from Canon and other manufacturers come with software for stitching panoramic pictures. Also check your digital camera's user manual to see if your camera has special modes that help you shoot panoramic pictures.
Free Software
Many of the free software offerings are based on an underlying library called Panorama Tools written by Professor Helmut Dursch.
Hugin is an easy to use cross-platform panoramic imaging tool set based on Panorama Tools. With hugin you can assemble a mosaic of photographs into a complete immersive panorama, stitch any series of overlapping pictures and much more. Details about hugin and free downloads are available on the hugin website.
Originally developed as a Graphical User Interface for Panorama Tools (hence the name), PTGui is now a full featured photo stitching application. PTGui is available for both Windows and Mac platforms.
PTAssembler is a Windows helper program for Panorama Tools. PTAssembler is designed to make creating Panorama Tools scripts as easy as possible. No knowledge of Panorama Tools or its script syntax is needed in order to operate PTAssembler.
PanoWizard is a freeware front-end for autopano and panorama tools.
Commercial Software
Free demo versions, often with 30 day trial periods, are available for most commercial panorama software packages.
Autopano Pro is a picture stitching program that automatically detects which pictures in a directory belong to a panorama set. It also has automatic color and exposure correction to deal with differences between the source images. It is a cross-platform software product that runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux. Most of the panoramas here on the Studio San Jose site were created with AutoPano Pro.
If you use PhotoShop CS3, there are tools for creating panoramas. For a tutorial on how to use them see the Creative Pro website.
Autostitch was the first fully automatic image stitcher. It is capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input. A free demo version is available. Autostitch technology is used in AutoPano Pro.
PanoramaPlus3 from Serif Software is an image and video frame stitching tool. It runs only on Windows.
PTMac is an easy to use front-end for creating panoramas using the powerful Panorama Tools (PanoTools) package. PTMac takes the user through the panorama creation process one step at a time with a friendly interface. PTMac is available for MacOS X and MacOS 8.6 to 9.x.
Calico Panorama is an automatic multi-row stitcher for the casual photographer. Calico was developed with ease of use in mind. Calico is available only for MacOS.