PTGui automatically locates matching elements in overlapping areas of adjacent images and assigns control points. You can make a good stitch with fewer than five control points.

In Stitcher 5's default interface, the user's point of view is from within the panorama. A 360-by-180-degree overview is not possible, although you can rotate the scene.

The next time you have the chance to photograph a grand historic building or a breathtaking landscape, why not take full advantage of your digital camera? Instead of trying to cram the scene in a single frame, you can take multiple shots and then use your Mac to fit those pictures together to create a panoramic view. You just need a panorama-stitching utility such as PTGui or Stitcher Unlimited.

PTGui 6.0.3. Before version 6.0.3, only PC-using panorama photographers could smugly brag about PTGui's amazing capabilities. Finally, Mac users can share in the PTGui fortune.

The application has simple and advanced modes. Simple mode automates most of the three-step process of stitching together photos to create a panorama. Images load and fall into their approximate positions with amazing speed. Control points, which match identical features in overlapping image areas, set themselves without prompting, too. The alignment process can be fine-tuned by adjusting individual images in the Panorama Editor, where you can also tweak the horizon, if desired.

PTGui's advanced mode makes other critical adjustments possible. For example, vertical lines shot with a fish-eye lens tend to bend when stitched. PTGui's Control Point Editor makes it a snap to straighten out lines that should be straight. Optimizing (where poorly aligned control points are identified and eliminated) can be a tedious process in other panoramic software, but in PTGui, it's lightning quick. The software races along, making it easy to reduce the difference in matching control-point positions to less than one pixel. That almost always assures a good stitch.

Rendering takes place at hyperspeed - and speed equals productivity. The same set of images that required more than an hour to render in Stitcher Unlimited (see below) took about five minutes in PTGui. Plus, images stitched by PTGui are beautifully crisp and clear.

Stitcher Unlimited 5.5. Stitcher Unlimited is a very different tool than PTGui, because it's mainly used as a QuickTime VR authoring tool à la Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio (may it rest in peace). But Stitcher was one of the earliest (and, for a long time, one of the best) tools available for creating panoramic images. Stitcher can blend 12, 18, 24, or more shots into a single seamless image, and it lets you create interactive virtual tours in QuickTime VR.

Stitcher always lagged behind the competition in its handling of fish-eye images. Fish-eye images require fewer shots to cover a full 360-degree area. With a 8mm circular fish-eye lens, it's possible to capture a scene in as few as four shots. Fewer shots make action panoramas possible and drastically cut rendering time on your Mac. Stitcher Unlimited 5.5 finally gives Stitcher users fish-eye support.

Stitcher Unlimited retains the unique interface of its predecessors, warping images and overlaying them. We used eight shots made with a full-frame 10.5mm fish-eye lens - Stitcher Unlimited's automatic stitching found enough matching elements for a successful stitch, and saved us a lot of time.

We also used Stitcher Unlimited to render a spherical image, necessary to make a cubic QuickTime VR movie. The process took a 1.42GHz dual-processor Power Mac G4 more than an hour. That's just too slow. PTGui, for its part, can do the job in a fraction of the time. When the render finished, the seamless panorama required only marginal touch-up work in Photoshop. However, some of the skyscrapers in our photo had noticeably warped vertical lines, and we found moiré-like banding in the sky and clouds. Not even a Photoshop guru would fiddle with the subtleties required to fix these problems - the result would look patched at best. Since stitching photos together to create panoramas is a combination of art and science, it's best to approach any stitching app with the assumption that "your mileage may vary."

The bottom line. PTGui is an affordable must-have for amateur and professional panographers. Stitcher Unlimited 5.5 is a good upgrade for current Stitcher users, but as a new purchase, it's an expensive and less-than-perfect solution.

PTGui 6.0.3

COMPANY: New House Internet Services
CONTACT: www.ptgui.com
PRICE: €65 ($85.63 at press time)
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later
Fast. No-fuss image stitching. Universal binary.
Not a QuickTime VR tool.

Stitcher Unlimited 5.5

COMPANY: Real Viz
CONTACT: www.realviz.com
PRICE: $580 ($249 upgrade)
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4 or later
Fish-eye support. Good QuickTime VR tools.
Slow. User guide costs an additional $23.