ROger: : Does it do a better job than PhotoShop? most programs do ;) : I'm disappointed in PSs : rendering of slightly differing hues in blue skies between adjacent : images. Correcting them after the fact has not worked well for me. nor anyone else who's struggled with it, as far as I know from the results I've seen. : But then, maybe I'm not taking the photos correctly. I doubt it. All wide angle lenses will exhibit a degree of darkening at the edges, so unless you plan on shooting panoramas with long lenses you'll see the dark bands on any attempts to stitch manually. especiallyI recently took : three photos of California hills in Monterey County from an elevated : vantage point (above the Carmel valley for those familiar with the : area). PS produced an almost perfect panorama, except for the sky. : There was a sharp change in hue between the three photos. I guess I : can just download it and try it! Before you do, have a look here at what another little freeware program can do with some rather nasty edges (images on the main page here: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html ) and if you like what you see you can download and try autostitch on those same images you shot to see how that copes. I've seen it do some really neat things with eliminating banding! there are some seriously clever algorithms at work in this program. However, as much as I'm fond of autostitch and its cleverness, the ease at which it can fiddle images automatically and the like, it's controls are not intuitive. For example you have to manually set the image size each time the proigram is used otherwise it just defaults to 1400 pixels (I think!) and from time to time it mucks things up, discombobulates things and hangs a lamp post fragmented in space Hugin is a lot more tweekable than autostitch, mainly in that you set stitching points. I just threw a rather nasty group of images at it, poles set in an ivy covered wall with a bit of sky above. I set three stitch points and it trundled off and produced a VERY nice output image with no grumbling and no bizzarre mangling. overall, very nice :) k
