I have an app on the iPhone that is amazing at making panoramas, but now that I have a DSLR I’d rather use that, which means I need software to stitch the photos. Turns out theres a bit difference between various software.

I got a tip from someone at ABi to try out ArcSoft PanoramaMaker, which is payware. It worked the first time I tried it, but subsequent stitches have been buggy and in some cases way off. It seems to be unnecessarily slow and very inaccurate, especially with pictures involving water. The final fail that made me try another app came today when I wanted to stitch 30 pictures into one epic panorama. The result that the ArcSoft software spit out after 10 minutes of working was this:

I don’t know what planet that is supposed to be, but I don’t think gravity exists on it. I then went to download Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) which is a free app that is supposed to do the same thing. After working on the exact same pictures for about a minute, it popped out this:

The full cropped photo measured a whopping 114 mega pixels, so I scaled it down to a 32 mega pixel photo that you can access by clicking the picture above (right click and open in new tab to circumvent the shadowbox popup). ICE handled it all perfectly, unlike ArcSoft’s epic fail. I knew there had to be some difference between the various software solutions, but I had not idea the difference was this big. I will of course use ICE from now on instead of that CrapSoft thing.