PhotoVista Panorama 3.0

OK, I am the biggest of Adobe fans, I really am. I've used nearly every product they produce. And I use many of them on a daily basis in my Real Estate business . . . Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. However, I'm not so big as to admit when Adobe doesn't do something as good as the little guy. So I have a new listing, it happens to be my next door neighbor's home. We're good friends and I'm bummed to see him leave. So yesterday I was putting together his virtual tour. It was the first time I had ever attempted to do a photo stiched panorama shot with my new Nikon D80. So I brought all the pictures into Photoshop CS2 and used the photomerge function. Well the result was less than spectacular. All the photos on the right and left lined up perfectly, but the 3 or 4 in the middle (showing my neighbor's home) were horrible. I even used a tripod for the first time. Even with my PS editing skills, it would have taken me all day to try to fix the panorama. My option was to reshoot the whole thing. Then I started looking around on TourFactory's site (where I host my virtual tours) and saw that their recommended program was PhotoVista 2.0. I quickly googled and found PhotoVista Panorama 3.0. There was a free trial, so I downloaded it. I brought all the photos (10) into the program and hit preview. For one thing it only took about 3 seconds to generate a preview. The preview looked just about perfect. I could see one or two spots where it wasn't aligned perfectly, but it was SOOOOO much better than what Photoshop had done. I hit the "Stitch" button and it went to work. Now each of these pics are a 10MP JPEG, and photoshop took about 1/2 hour to compose it. (Mostly because my laptop is nearly 5 years old and about to die) PhotoVista took a mere 2 or 3 minutes. And the results are much better. This will be well worth the $60.00 to purchase the program.

See the results yourself here: Virtual Tour

You'll want to click on the "Street Scene" tab to see what I'm talking about. There is also a panorama of the back yard. Each panorama is indicated by a "dot" on the tab. Anyway, thought I'd share that yes, even I, found something that works better than an Adobe product. Sorry PS team, but you should make Bruce buy this company and use this in place of your Photomerge. :-)