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 under twenty seconds; just long enough for you to plan out your next pano.
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.
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.