Teorex debuts affordable pano app

As well as the software that ships with your digital camera, photographers are faced with quite an array of all-in-one apps for cataloging, editing, and sharing their photos these days. Apps like Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom, Apple's Aperture and iPhoto, Corel's AfterShot Pro, and Phase One's Capture One make light work of many common tasks photographers want to achieve in the digital darkroom, but for some reason, they've pretty-much universally ignored one feature. All five apps must rely on third-party solutions when it comes to panorama stitching.

Of course, many cameras can stitch one-dimensional panoramas automatically these days, but 2D panoramas are another matter entirely. That's a shame, because for relatively static subjects 2D panos can be useful for getting more into the scene when the wide-angle coverage of your lens isn't sufficient. They're also a handy way to put more pixels on your subject than your camera's sensor offers.

A mixed blessing: PhotoStitcher couldn't be much simpler, but lacks control over stitching. Screenshot provided by Teorex.

If you have software such as Photoshop, Elements PaintShop Pro, or the like you've probably already got pretty powerful panorama-creation tools at your fingertips. Not everybody wants to spend as much as these apps cost, but there are also quite a few affordable standalone panorama apps around, and some which are completely free, although they vary quite a bit in complexity.

Now Teorex, the Russian software company behind photo apps such as Inpaint, iResizer, and DupHunter, has thrown its hat in the ring with an affordable, dedicated panorama stitching app of its own. Sensibly named PhotoStitcher, the new app is priced at just US$20 for a single-seat home license, or US$25 for a two-seat home license. Commercial customers will pay US$40. As shown in the tutorial, PhotoStitcher couldn't be much simpler: just select your source images, let the program handle the stitching, then select the area you wish to crop and save as a single image. The downside of that simplicity is that it doesn't appear as if any tools are available for adjusting your panoramas, if the automatic stitching gets it wrong. (But then, that's true of in-camera stitching as well, and consumers seem happy to accept that limitation in exchange for ease of use.)

Teorex PhotoStitcher is available immediately on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. A trial version of the software is available to download.