Pat St. Clair, professional photographer and editor for online magazine VRMag, specialized in panorama and virtual reality, carried out a review of Autopano Pro. In a detailled article, he describes how he worked with Autopano Pro and gives examples of panoramas stitched with the program.

Looking over many features of Autopano Pro, Pat St. Clair shows how to create a panorama with the program. He highlights some interesting aspects of the software: ability to drag and drop photos on the program window and order the images automatically, working with RAW images, the vertical lines correction, the Smartblend ghost remover, the ability to shoot hand held with confidence, etc.

He also used Cubic Converter to create virtual tours with spherical panoramas stitched with Autopano Pro.

Read the entire review

As we announced it a few weeks ago, we dedicate today an article to the new book of French photographer Bertrand Bodin: “Vauban, les sites majeurs”. This book comes after a first one released last year: “Briançon, Vauban et son empreinte”.

Vauban (1633-1707) was the most important military engineer of his age. He designed new types of fortifications and advised Louis XIV on how to make France’s borders safer and more defensible. Find out more about Vauban on Wikipedia.

This book has been ordered by the Vauban association, to support the candidature of the 14 major Vauban works to be listed as Unesco World Heritage sites. Bertrand Bodin had to work quickly: “It was an urgent order, since I only had 6 month to seal the project, including the publishing. If you consider that the 14 sites to be shot are located everywhere on the French territory, you can better estimate the challenge this project represented!” told Bertrand Bodin to journalist Nicolas Mériau (Image & Nature magazine n°13).

From a technical point of view, Bertrand Bodin used a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II with a 16 million pixels sensor and a wide-angle lenses, like the EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye. Many photos of the book are stitched images. The photographer used the program Autopano Pro to stitch the images: “This program is by far better than the others. I have been working for a long time with Stitcher and PTGui and I could make the difference. One of Autopano Pro’s strengths is to be able to create panoramic images from photos shot with different focal distances: a 15mm with a 24mm, a 20mm with a 35mm, etc. What’s more, it corrects very well fisheye distortions. And, despite its advanced functionalities, it remains very easy to use”.

To find out more about Bertrand Bodin, you can visit his website.

VRMAG is an online magazine specialized in virtual reality photography. It deals with subjects relative to the creation of virtual tours in its articles, reports, reviews and interviews.

In its 29th issue, VRMAG propose an interview of Alexandre Jenny, founder of the company Kolor and initiator of the program Autopano Pro.

Alexandre Jenny reviews his beginning in photography, and how he got interested in panoramic photography, from 1998 onwards: “During week-ends, I was used to climb the mountains. When reaching the top, you often have beautiful landscapes with a large view. So I shoot a lot… right, left… but really soon I felt a little uncomfortable because I wanted the full landscape, not only part of it. This is why I came into panoramic. There was pretty nothing out at that time or, at least, there was nothing automatic.”

Reviewing the history of the program Autopano Pro, the competitor programs, and the interesting features of Autopano Pro, Alexandre Jenny then gives some clues about the software development for the coming months, in particular the improvement of HDR support.

VRMAG will test Autopano Pro in its next issue.

Read the whole interview.

Image & Nature magazine has just dedicated a test to Autopano Pro in its 13th issue. This test is interesting because it quotes several arguments of Autopano Pro and tests them one after the other.

The 5 tested arguments are: ease of use, automatic detection of photos belonging to a same panorama, automatic correction of color and exposure differences, stitching of images having different focal distances, and stitching of images shot every which way.

Each argument was tested and positively validated by the magazine editors! Phew!

Image & Nature magazine begins by the program’s interface, which is “clear and intuitive”. About the automatic panorama detection, “it is amusing to note that the program often finds more stitchings that what you excpect”.

The conclusion of the test of color and exposure correction cannot be clearer: “the software’s capabilities in this field are totally impressive”! Performances in exposure correction “can be built on to perform HDR stitching (high dynamic range images)”.

The test of stitching images of different focal distances was quite advanced, since Autopano Pro could even “stitch a photo shot with a 15mm fisheye with a photo shot with a 35mm!”

Finally, no matter if the photos are shot vertically, horizontally or slanting, “Autopano Pro reorders all photos and gives the best possible stitching”.

The article concludes: “this program is the best pick! Simple and powerful, it puts panoramic photography at everybody’s reach, and enables even wider applications. A must-have!

This 13th issue of Image & Nature magazine also dedicated a test to the new Canon EOS-1 Mark III reflex camera. This magazine is currently being sold in French stores and on http://www.image-nature.com.