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Panoramic Image Stitching Tools for Unix?
jbuberel asks: "I just got myself a fancy new Canon Powershot S400 camera. One of it's nifty features is it's 'Panoramic Assist' mode that helps you line up a series of images that can later be stitched together to form one larger panoramic image. Of course the software that ships with the camera to do the stitching is Windows-only. After spending some time probing freshmeat.net and google.com, I came across one dead project, and another relatively academic project who's tools are largely undocumented. So are there any up-to-date tools for composing panoramic photos in Unix? With so many digital photo afficianados out there, I was surprised there wasn't an easy-to-use GIMP plugin for this."
Panotools is a wonderful toolkit for panoramas. While the main site is down, you can find mirrors. It isn't an automatic solution - you can't provide it with a series of images and let it try to automatically line them up. But with a little manual work it does a wonderful job of stitching images and correcting for basic lens distortions.
Bleh!
I also searched for easy to use panorama software. So far the best solution I have found is running The Panorama Factory with wine. Works great.
That was Panotools - you can read the story here.
iPix claims to own the concept of flattening out an image taken through a fisheye lens into a panorama. They are rather aggressive in going after anyone they thing might infringe.
This is part of the reason that iPix has a rather bad reputation among many people (the other reasons are the low quality of the images their software generates, and the per-image-generated fees they charge for the use of their software).