Pano is an advanced tool, but sometimes you may not get the results you expect. We definitely encourage you to experiment and have fun; after your first few panos, you'll be a natural. Here are a few quick tips to get you going:
Pano works best when the objects in the scene are far away; this helps keep angles in line at the edges of each photo. It's a good thing ocean views and cityscapes make for fantastic vistas!
Try to keep your phone stationary between photos; it's best if the field of view pivots around a single point.
Sometimes the best way to get a good match is to move the phone towards or away from you as you pivot.
The transparent Guide is where most of the processing magic happens; if you can plan your pano so that these areas have simple features, you can get better results.
For Pano, stitching photos together is a three-step process. First, it uses pattern-matching techniques to find out exactly how each pair of adjacent photos overlaps, and then it finds the best way to align them. Second, Pano applies a colour-correction gradient across each pair of photos to correct for your phone's camera's autoexposure and white balancing. Finally, all the photos are blended together and the image cropped to a neat rectangle. Voila! All in a matter of seconds.
Stitching a four-photo pano will take around twenty seconds; just long enough for you to plan out your next pano.
We use Google's Licensing Library in Pano. If you purchased Pano and you're getting a license error, the first thing to check is your network connectivity – Pano doesn't need to be online all the time to check your license, but it does check once in a while. If you're still having trouble, reinstalling Pano from the Android Market is another good bet. And, of course, you can always email us at support@debaclesoftware.com and we'll get you sorted out.
Anything to do with purchasing and the Android Market is unfortunately out of our hands. Google has full control over that, and we can't resolve issues with purchases if they're not going through properly. Your best bet is to get in touch with Google.
We've pinned down the problem and we're hard at work on a fix on it. Sit tight and we'll have it out as soon as we can. In the meantime, the good news is that that issue doesn't affect the photos that Pano produces in the slightest – so shoot away!
Due to memory constraints on your phone, photos are first scaled to a reasonable size and then stitched together. The width depends on the number of photos in the pano and their alignment. The overall size depends on the capabilities of your phone's hardware.
Depending on how well the photos are lined up, Pano shifts the images up and down during the alignment phase. It then trims the excess off the top and bottom of the finished pano to leave you with a clean rectangle. The better the alignment, the taller the end result will be.
Pano saves your panos to your camera's default folder – right alongside the photos from your camera app. Panos are easily identifiable by their PANO_ prefix.
Because your panos are very wide, they are shrunk down to fit on your phone's screen when you view them in the Gallery. However, the way the Gallery works is to take whatever initially fits on the screen, whatever resolution that happens to be, and then blow those pixels up when you pinch or double-tap to zoom in. Don't worry, when you view your panos on your computer, they'll look sharp as a tack.
Ghosts occur when something in the scene (usually a person or other moving object) happens to be in one photo but not the other where the two overlap. You can alleviate this by keeping such objects out of the transparent Guide when you're taking your photos.
Oh but there is! Run, do not walk, to our Pano Flickr Group and upload all your great panos. We'd love to see them!
Pano was made by Debacle Software, a three-man operation consisting of Adam (image processing guru), Julian (iPhone/Android coder supreme), and Eric (rockstar graphic designer). Debacle is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Thank you! You can send an email over to support@debaclesoftware.com.
We sure do, however so far they're all for the iPhone. We just released a brand new Photography App called Self Image; it makes taking photos of yourself and friends with your iPhone a snap!
Pano uses the libjpeg library to help us with our magic. We also got some help on Pano for Android from Mike Rooke.