Brand New In The App Store: Pano

By
On October 17, 2008

I have had the opportunity to be using Pano for the week leading up to its release tonight and all I can tell you is — This is a fantastic app!

As the Pano website describes it…

Pano for iPhone lets you take beautiful, seamless panoramic photos straight from your iPhone, no other software necessary

That’s right, Pano lets you take two three or four pictures and immediately turn them into a panoramic shot. I used to do this by snapping a bunch of images and then pasting them together. Pano does the same thing only… it does it on the iPhone itself and it does it so well you would never know that the image started as a number of different shots.

Does it work?

You bet.

Does it work well?

Judge for yourself.

This is one of theirs…


 

And this is one of mine…

and another…

As the Debacle website explains, stitching photos together is a three-step process. It begins with a pattern-matching technique that figures out the best way to align one shot with the next. It then applies a ”colour-correction gradient“ across each pair of photos. This effectively makes the ”seems“ disappear. The app then crops the image into a nice neat rectangle. Best of all, it does all this in just under 20 seconds. (Like we’ve been saying here on WOiP- the iPhone is a handheld computer NOT a phone.)

There are a couple of relevant caveats.

First, because of the configuration of the iPhone’s photo app, panoramas viewed in the Photo Library will look squished and/or blurry. They aren’t, but they will appear that way on the iPhone. Once transfered to the computer they look great. (I know this is the case firsthand.)

Second, emailing a panorama directly from the iPhone isn’t perfect ad the image will come out small. This, again, is an iPhone limitation in that the iPhone’s Mail app sets the maximum width of photo attachments. Again, panoramas are stored full size and, once transfered to a computer, can be emailed in all their panoramic glory.

Finally, you should know that the good folks at Debacle Software have set up an iPhone Panorama Flickr Group. You can see the panoramas others have created and even share your own.

You can check out the website HERE.

And get the app HERE in the App Store for just $2.99.