Panorama Maker 6 Serial

Panorama Maker is a powerful and easy-to-use photo stitching software that lets you create and share stunning panoramic pictures and virtual reality movies. Our automated stitching process makes it easy to create breathtaking landscapes - even if you've never done it before! Media management and photo editing tools are offered to better organize your sources and apply final touches to your work.

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I first used an earlier version of Panorama Maker many years ago (pre-Dyxum). It came as part of a bundle with a Nikon Coolpix 3200 P&S. For a long time it was a much-used application, but I ended up losing it on one of many PC re-installations.
Panorama Maker 6 is very recognisable from that earlier version, but it has grown up a bit and become a lot more capable.
One of the great things about Panorama Maker is the combination of ease of use and the ability to manually 'tweak' panoramas where required. The package gives some very sensible advice for getting good panoramas; locking exposure, ensuring reasonable overlap, keeping things level, using a tripod etc. However, it is often when you step just outside the recommendations (and thereby make things a little more challenging for stitching software), that you end up with an image that is a little more interesting.
Panorama Maker is quite capable of making sensible guesses at what pictures it should be working with and what it should be doing with them. If you click on one of the thumbnails displayed once you open it up, it will automatically select others that it thinks belong in the same series. It groups photos by looking at the timestamps in EXIF to group shots taken within 40 seconds of each other. If like me, you are a little 'trigger happy' you can find that it picks up more photos than actually belong together, but that is no great worry because you can un-check the box for auto select and pick the shots yourself.
Panorama Maker will analyse the selected shots and will make a good guess at what order they should come in and whether they should be arranged horizontally, vertically or in a matrix. Most of the time the automatic analysis will get it right, but if you are doing something a little more ambitious that might confuse the auto options, it is not too much effort to go an extra click and select the type yourself.
When told to stitch, the software works quickly (making use of any graphics cards present) and will generally come up with a very creditable result. If you have not set it too much of a challenge, the results are quite likely to be very good first time; I had been impressed with the abilities of the old version, but am happy to report that the stitching engine seems to have improved.
If you do notice a glitch where things have not matched up, you can hit the manual button; at which point Panorama Maker will allow you to choose which section of the Panorama you want to work on. The next screen shows you the two pictures being joined for that section, and where it thinks the common points are; you can either correct these or move the pointers to places you think are more appropriate.
As well as allowing you to choose points that match on each section of the contributing photographs, Panorama Maker 6 also allows you to choose where the blending lines between each shot occur. On the screen below, Panorama Maker shows what portions of each photograph it is planning to use. If you want to alter where these divisions fall (say to avoid a figure that is present in one photo but had moved in the next) you can adjust the line of transition between neighbouring photos by clicking on the orange line to create a point and then dragging it left or right.
The orange lines show what parts of the 4 shots that make up this panorama will be used - Panorama Maker allows you to choose to use more of one photo in preference to another
PanoramaMaker 6 also offers an automatic crop which can be turned on or off
A slight 'glitch'
I did get occasional errors cropping up telling me that the programme was out of memory; despite my 64bit, 12GB machine still having plenty of memory to spare. Closing everything down and restarting Panorama Maker got everything working again, but it was a bit of a pain. I also found some instances where I would choose a set of matched points and told the software to stitch only for it to get 6% through and then reset to where it was before the stitch command without any error message. Arcsoft can't replicate my fault, so it might just be down to the set-up on my home machine.
The competition
There are some very good panorama tools available, including two well-regarded ones that are free: Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) and Hugin. In addition to these, the more recent Sony Alpha and NEX cameras offer their own stitched panorama modes.
Microsoft ICE
Image Composite Editor is available from Microsoft Research. Beware; there is no official support for this product, although there are community pages which can be very helpful. Some aspects of ICE are leading edge but it can be buggy. I've had versions of ICE that have worked and then updated them to newer versions that just won’t run; however, the version I currently have (1.4.4.0) has given me no problems. You can throw some really difficult stuff at ICE and it will make a good stab at stitching; possibly the best default stitching I have seen. But if ICE doesn't work with a set of pictures you are stuck, as there is no in-built scope for editing/tweaking.
Hugin
Hugin is vast and daunting; there are lots of options and very little guidance. Setting Hugin off on a panorama brings up a pop-up window that shows you reams of warning messages going past as it tries various ways of patching stuff together. Other stitching programmes probably go through the same process, but Hugin is alarmingly indiscreet about what it can't match up as it goes along. The default results can be very good, but knowing how to improve it beyond that is something I've not managed to fathom.
The case for Panorama Maker 6
The big benefit of Panorama Maker 6 is not its default stitching (which is still very good) but its ability to control the end results in a reasonably intuitive manner once automatic stitching gives up. Although the competition is free, what you pay for with Panorama Maker is this ability to control. While I am sure that people can master Hugin (which also seems to offer control), I think it would take a reasonable amount of time and effort. If you want more control over the end result with panoramas, the extra cost of Panorama Maker for supported and reasonably intuitive stitching software is likely to be well worthwhile.
However, don't just take my word for it. You can download all three (ArcSoft offers Panorama Maker 6 on a 15 day free trial). Try them out and let us know what you think..

Edited by Bob J - 07 May 2013 at 16:01