I was comparing three four tools to create panorama pictures. 30 pictures were taken hand-held with a D700 in all manual mode. Click on the picture to see it larger in flickr (sorry, I couldn’t upload full sizes, because the JPG-filesize of the output was between 40-60 MB, too big for flickr).

Autopano

Photoshop CS4 Photomerge

PTGUI

Stitcher Unlimited

and another Stitcher Unlimited sample with a limited number of pictures:

I’m disappointed with photoshop and would have choosen ptgui as a winner, but I didn’t like the windows (in the building) in ptgui, so overall the best results were from produced by autopano. I’ve added Stitcher Unlimited to this article afterwards, it appears to be very professional, but for good results you probably require a tripod with pano head which I don’t have.

Update 20091001: In the meantime I’ve done a couple of more images using autopano and so far have always been happy with the results. Please note that I not always cropped the pictures, so please excuse the black areas on some of the samples below:

Panorama and Stitching – Images by Markus Linke

Also I figured that using 30 images mixed horizontal and vertical is not a good idea. If I do panoramas today I only do either horizontal or portrait and usually do much less images (e.g. 5ish). If processed by autopana the merges are nearly undetectable.

Last but not least the scene choosen for comparing the products was appereantly very difficult for the software because of the electric cables in the scene. “Normal” landscape work far better …