Gerard Maynard has struck again! The American photographer shot Yosemite National Park from 5 different viewpoints and created stunning gigapixel panoramas. Gerard Maynard is used to creating gigapixel images: remember the Harlem 13 Gigapixels world record, created in partnership with Kolor two years ago.

This time, Gerard Maynard was invited by xRez to take part in their Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project. He shot 5 panoramas; the biggest is the one of the Glacier Point. It includes 2,046 images, has a resolution of 17.27 gigapixels and sizes 214414 x 80571 pixels.

Autopano Pro was used in the stitching and rendering of all five gigapixel panoramas.

Visit Yosemite 17 Gigapixels website and browse the images as if you were flying between the mountains!

The photographers community Photo.net released a detailed review of Autopano Pro, covering many aspects of the panorama creation software.

The article is written like a step-by-step tutorial and enables to get an overview of Autopano Pro. The reviews concludes: “Autopano Pro offers many more ways to control exposure, as well as adjusting and moving images around to fine-tune the result. But it is also quite an easy tool to quickly automatically create panoramas from your work.”

Read the full review of Autopano Pro on Photo.net

Kolor and Trinum announce their partnership to propose real-time and high-resolution panoramic webcam images.

Trinum develops a concept of motorized webcams and install them in tourist places, mainly in ski resorts. The company choosed Autopano Server software from Kolor to stitch the images automatically and produce high resolution panoramic images.

The webcam shoots 3 rows of 15 images each and Autopano Server automatically stitches them together, no matter the weather conditions. Image resolution is often the weak point of the webcams. Stitching webcam images together enable to increase the resolution and gives a panoramic view of the site.

Autopano Server enables a website to have an image stitching service integrated in its workflow. This can be very useful in several fields: industry, tourism, real estate…

Here are some examples of the panoramic webcams (clicking on an image opens the actual webcam):

Combloux ski resort (Haute-Savoie, France):

On Monday 27th October, 2008:

On Tuesday 28th October, 2008:

Val Thorens ski resort (Savoie, France):

On Monday 27th October, 2008:

On Tuesday 28th October, 2008:

Mac Life has just dedicated a review to Autopano Pro. The software has been rated 4/5 and was picked as an Editors’ Choice.

Some quotes from the review:
“Autopano Pro is a highly intelligent app that automates much of the task and creates some truly lovely panoramic shots with minimal effort.”

“One of the first things we loved about Autopano Pro is that it can automatically search a folder full of photos and find the ones that are related, that will ultimately end up stitched together. It then does a first pass at putting together the big picture, and you’re likely to smile when you see what the app comes up with on its own.”

The review points out the “powerful image stitching, extensive controls and very precise color corrections and edge blending with minimal effort”. The author found however that some of the “deeper controls and options” take time to master.
We are aware about that and will work on better integrate the advanced features, like the control point editor. We are also planning to produce new video tutorials that will be added to the existing ones and that will explain step by step how to use easily and efficiently all deep features of Autopano Pro, that can be very useful for difficult cases of image stitching.

You can read the full review on its webpage: http://www.maclife.com/article/reviews/autopano_pro

Arnaud Frich and Kolor tested the panoramic head that will be used to shoot Paris 20 Gigapixels.Paris 20 Gigapixels will be a stitching of more than 2000 individual photos. The image will be visible on its own website and anyone will be able to zoom in the minor details of the French capital.

The panoramic head was designed specifically for this project. It enables the mounting of 2 SLR cameras so that the shooting will be twice as fast and thus the lightness variations will be minimized.

For the final image, 2 Canon 1DS Mark III will be used, each one with either a 100/400 mm, f/4.5-5.6 lens or a 400mm f/5.6L lens from Canon.

Find out more about Paris 20 Gigapixels project.

The exciting collaborative project of the Panorama Book 2008 is fast approaching! Here is a first preview of some of the pages of the book, and the poster that promoted the book in the booth of Kolor at Photokina fair in September.

The book is currently being edited and will be printed in two weeks. It will be available by the end of November.

The company Elephorm and photographer Arnaud Frich created a DVD on how to practice the panoramic photography and how to use Autopano Pro.

This DVD is available in French as for now, but is already being translated in English. It will be available on our website very soon. The price is 49.90 euros.

Kolor joined the International VR Photography Association, as a member and a sponsor. The IVRPA is an international association of professionals who create and produce interactive, immersive images. Its members include professional photographers, multimedia and web developers, artists, enthusiasts, students, and companies and individuals that support the VR technology with software and hardware (source: IVRPA).

By joining and sponsoring the IVRPA, Kolor wants to help promoting and support the uses of image based VR through education, community forums, networking opportunities and technical support.

In the framework of this membership, Alexandre Jenny, founder of Kolor, talked about the evolution of the panoramic photography and presented the image-stitching software Autopano Pro to the IVRPA audience during the Photokina fair held in Cologne (Germany) in September.

Find out more and join the IVRPA on their website: http://ivrpa.org