Super-panoramic showdown for Mac

Another vote for PTgui. It's amazing and while it could use an update it's output is what counts and it's been the best I've worked with.

I really like the Image Composite Editor: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

It's free and should handle 100+ images.

Photoshop only seems to work really well with stitching flatbed scans or images with very little distortion. For those purposes, it is an excellent choice. I don't think it was made to handle high distortion panos.

I've tried many different applications for pano-stitching and have found that Arcsoft's Panorama Maker to be one of the best. I'll have to check out Autopan to see if it's any better, though. Hopefully there's a trial available. I bought Calico a few years ago and haven't gotten very good results.

I test out most of those programs with a series of over 100 images I shot from Coit Tower in San Francisco.

Hmm, 103 10-megapixel images in Photoshop on 103 layers? Let's see, creating a 10MP (3648 x 2736) image in Photoshop uses 28.6 MB, so 103 layers would be 2945 MB or about 3 GB just for the image data. Photoshop recommends 3-5x your file size in memory, so unless you have 9-15 GIGABYTES in you computer it will start doing memory swapping to the hard drive which is MUCH slower than your RAM.

I haven't done a lot of stitching, but have worked with big Photoshop files and can say that once it runs out of RAM and goes to the scratch disk everything slows to a crawl, no matter how fast your Mac (or PC) is.

@nutella - Do you really think throwing all these high-res image would be better in BeOS? It's still a lot of data to work with, and it's mostly up to the stitching app to do the hard work anyway.

Bleh, so your mac becomes unusable...what a drag. This would not happen in BeOS then again I doubt BeOS had a pano-stitcher :-/

I would like to second the recommendation for AutoPano Pro. I use AutoPano Giga on a regular basis, and it is intended to handle even larger panoramas than the one described in the article. AutoPano is an excellent program with (considering the ludicrous amounts of data involved) high performance and output quality. It is easy to handle, and if its own (very good) auto stitching algorithm is unable to handle certain pictures, it is simple to add control points on your own.

While smaller panoramas can be handled by other programs, I have found that AutoPano performs well with large and small sets. The target audience for the large panos are people using equipment such as the Gigapan Imagers (www.gigapan.org).

PTGui should have been tested as well. I'm voting for an updated article including this software as well because I've been testing pretty much all of these option a while ago and eventually chose PTGui and never loked back. I'm commonly stitching 10-15 image panos from 21Mpix images and PTGui does the job amazingly well!

I have been experimenting with PTgui,I have to say, it seems very fast. The only problem area I had in one test was my Cat was in the shot and ended up with 3 ears. (she moved between rotations)... export to Photoshop is easy, should the need arise.

PTGui has to be included in here. Pretty big omission. While the interface is less than elegant it's given me the best results of any stitcher I've used.

I was having poor performance on my iPhone 3GS (purchased 2 days ago) as compared to my 1st generation iPod touch. Latency was about double and download speeds 1/2 that of the touch. Now, tonight, I cannot see my wifi network (Airport Extreme) nor my neighbors (Netgear) while the touch sees them just fine.