News :: 15MR: Zoner Panorama Maker v8.0.1.5

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Zoner Panorama Maker version 8.0.1.5 by Zoner Inc.—A panorama-building application with wizard-style interface.

As Giveaway of the Day states: (Part)

“Ever seen a great mountain panorama that took your breath away and wish you could do yourself? You can – easily – with Zoner Panorama Maker. This wizard-based program is smart enough to usually find the correct joining points on its own! But when it doesn’t, that’s no problem either: you have tools to easily fix them.”

Sample

• Panorama of billowing smoke (original 2 photos provided by Matt Phillips Under CC)

A note on the sample: The color variations you see aren’t because of the program; they are reflections off the window in front of the photographer. As well, I did not alter it outside Zoner Panorama Maker

Quick Pros

• Wizard interface makes process simple
• Results are good quality
• Most of the features one could want built-in

Quick Cons

• Few issues with buildings lining up; required lining up points and changing options
• Still need to take out to PhotoShop if you need to airbrush some parts
• Tends to favor the top of the image with its points

Expansion

While I have done panoramas a few times in PhotoShop a long time ago, I know how painful it can be to do these by hand, especially if you don’t have balanced original images or ones that the perspective or angle is close. While I have not actively needed or looked for an application such as this one, it is nice to see there are ones such as this one, as well as other out there.

Outside of fighting a little bit with building lining up on future runs, this application has the ability to correct these issues by allowing you to set the matching ‘points’ between both photos from what it had selected. Its selections are dead-on for matching, it may just pick positions that are not optimal for lining up other portions of the photo (In my attempts so far, it favored the top of the images.) I had also hoped for a built-in airbrush or similar to correct minor imperfections; Alas, there is no such thing, requiring you to take the resulting file out to PhotoShop.

Besides these issues, I found that this application seemed to work well all in all, and was very easy to use. As you can see above, the results are good from this application with a little tweaking. Compared to how much work is required to do these in PhotoShop, it is a time-saver, even if you had to reset a few of the points yourself.

Final Verdict

While it does have a few small issues, this application does what it is supposed to. If you do any sort of photography and look to do panoramas, you might as well pick up this application now. As for paying $9.99, it is a very good price for an application such as this one; The author may want to look into making a ‘Pro’ version with some ‘fixing’ brush tools and allow for more ‘points’ or similar, toss in a few more features and bump up the price tag a little for an all-in-one application.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, March 22, 2007