Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) is a new free panoramic photo maker from the same people who gave the world the super cool Photosynth technology. It’s Windows only of course (.NET too in fact), but it offers an awesome set of features for a free program. Not only can you export to standard file formats like JPEG, PNG and Photoshop’s PSD, but also to HD formats with ‘deep zoom’ using Silverlight, just like the big boys do. Fabulous stuff.
In use it offers drag and drop simplicity, just pull the images into the box and the program will make best efforts to stitch the shots together. In my test it managed an almost flawless stitch of four out of 6 images, but the last two, with a phone pole in the way, kind of broke the image. Not seriously, but enough to render it useless.
Still it’s better than I’ve experienced with any other panorama software to date, so kudos so the development team. Excellent stuff!
Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. You shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom. Features: state-of-the-art stitching algorithms, advanced orientation adjustment view, and exposure blending.
