The Best Panorama Photo Stitching Software

When faced with subjects with short and wide features such as landscape vistas, it may be appropriate to crop the photo to remove unnecessary detail in the top and bottom parts of the scene. These images are known as panoramas.

However, sometimes a scene is so vast that even the widest lens you have doesn’t capture the full view, no matter how much you back up. That’s when you might want to create a panorama using the best photo stitching software to join several photos together, creating an image with a wider field of view, or even a time-lapse collage.

To learn how to take a panoramic picture, simply frame up your scene on a tripod, and compose your images vertically. Ensure the tripod is level and then take photos of your subject. It is recommended to overlap each shot with the previous one by around 50%. This helps the software link each photo together easily. Below we’ll take a look at the best panorama software available for both Windows and Mac to stitch your images together.

Windows and Mac:

• Autostitch

• Hugin

• GigaPan Stitch

• ArcSoft Panorama Maker

• Panoweaver

• PTGui

Windows only:

• Image Composite Editor (ICE)

Mac only:

• Panorama Stitcher

OS: Windows, Mac

Price: free, commercial options available

Autostitch is a panoramic software that utilizes a SIFT algorithm to align separate images to create seamless panoramic photographs. It works best when photos are taken from a single point, for example, when swiveling the camera on top of a tripod. Rather than moving the camera around in hand due to the perspective differences between shots. Autostitch was developed by researchers at the University of British Columbia.

Pros:

• Ability to process and stitch together a large number of images in one click

• Automatic blending and lighting correction

Cons:

• The resulting panoramas sometimes need cropping

OS: Windows, Mac, Linux

Price: free (open-source)

Hugin is possibly the most up-to-date panoramic software to stitch photos together. Although 16 years old, it not only stitches images into panoramas in traditional horizontal format and also projects panos into a fisheye shape, creating a circular appearance. Hugin is also a high dynamic range (HDR) generator.

Pros:

• Generation of HDR panoramas

• Adaptiveness to camera distortions

Cons:

• Might be hard to master at first

OS: Windows, Mac

Price: $99 (standard), $299 (professional), with a free trial

Panoweaver is designed to not only stitch photographs together for panoramas but has now also developed to encompass virtual reality tour creation. This is especially useful for those wishing to display 360-degree panoramas and location tours online via HTML5 and Flash VR and view content on desktop and mobile devices.

Pros:

• The resulting panoramas are navigable and web-ready

• Support of both spherical and cubic projections

Cons:

• During the free trial, all panoramas will have a watermark on them

OS: Windows

Price: free

ICE by the Microsoft Research Computational Photography Group is an intelligent panoramic stitcher that stands out a little from other panorama stitching software. Not only can it do the usual panoramic stitching, it can also automatically complete gaps in the panorama, give full-resolution previews and even generate panoramas from panning video and stop-motion action by overlaying key features on the background of the media.

Pros:

• Autofill in the missing areas of photographs

• Export in layers

Cons:

• Stability of the program can be improved