In today’s column, we’ll be reviewing panorama software from i2Align. Their photo merge program, i2k Quickage, stitches photos together to create panoramic images.
Jai’s Take:
“I was, overall, very impressed with i2k Quickage. I’ve been attempting to create panoramas for 3-4 years now with varying success. I have tried several programs to aid with stitching photos together and it’s seldom an easy task. Unfortunately, I’ve tried so many stitching programs in the past that I’ve forgotten what most of them were but in the past year I have used PTGui. I went back through my archive and selected a few of my past panoramas and restitched them with Quickage for comparison. There are three things that really impressed me.
1) How little the user needs to tweak with settings. I never once had to define control points, crop wavy black edges, or had to try to manually drag the horizon into a straight line. You drop the photos in the window and it goes to work.
2) I was surprised at how it preserves as much of the photo as possible by modifying the perspective. The panorama of Blackpool Tower, England (shown below) really illustrates this. Quickage was able to keep a lot more of the photo by choosing a better perspective model that I did.
Original panorama – click to enlarge
3) It does a great job of choosing the which parts of photos to use when there is overlap. When there is activity in the scene, you are going to have photos that are inconsistent. Cars and people are going to be in different places in each shot. The panorama shown below of Dam Square, Amsterdam shows how much better Quickage was at choosing which parts of which photos to use. I remember working on that set of photos for a long time and Quickage did a much better job without any work at all on my part. It even did better at straightening the horizon, and the vertical lines of the buildings.
Original panorama – click to enlarge
The only times I ran into problems were when I tried to get fancy. Quickage would start generating memory errors when I tried to stitch much more than 12 images together. It also had problems when I tried to reconstruct a 360 degree shot of the inside of a circus tent. Every other time it worked great. For beginners, this program will really open the door to making some good panoramas. I think the experts will find this program to be an enormous time-saver for at least 3 out of 4 panoramas that you put together.”
More of Jai’s Before & After Panoramas:
Conwy Castle, Wales – 2007
Original panorama – click to enlarge
Same panorama assembled with Quickage – click to enlarge
Oswald Park, Oregon – 2007
Original panorama – click to enlarge
Same panorama assembled with Quickage – click to enlarge
Construction Job Site – 2005
Original panorama – click to enlarge
Same panorama assembled with Quickage – click to enlarge
Blackpool, England – 2009
Original panorama – click to enlarge
Same panorama assembled with Quickage – click to enlarge
Astoria Column, Oregon – 2005
Original panorama – click to enlarge
Same panorama assembled with Quickage – click to enlarge
Here is a view from the top of the Astoria Column, taken on that same day in 2005 – Jai had never been able to properly assemble this prior to using Quickage:
Beeb’s Take:
We’ve been taking panoramas for years, so I was very interested to try out i2k Quickage. To test it out, I walked out on the deck and snapped a few quick shots of the backyard. I opened the program, selected the photos, and poof – there was a panorama. I didn’t have to read any instructions or how-tos, because it was so simple and the buttons on the program are self-explanatory. I think this software is great, because not only does it deliver top-notch panoramas, but anyone could use it. I’ve watched Jai snap photos for panoramic projects – he lines the camera up with such great care and precision. I, on the other hand, took about four seconds haphazardly shooting some photos, and although it would have turned out better had I taken more time, it was still able to assemble it despite my lack of finesse. And unlike other programs, this does it all for you – there’s no need to painstakingly tweak each one by hand, as we’ve had to do in the past. i2k Quickage gets amazing results with no effort on the user’s part – I would highly recommend this for anyone with an interest in panoramic photography. Anybody could make an amazing montage using this, even if you’ve never done it before.
Thanks to our friends at FuelMyBlog for sending us this program to test out!
What a great format for reviewing this kind of product! I enjoy taking photos, but I haven’t done much to fix/alter them. So I’d definitely be in the Novice category for this. I appreciate seeing the comparative photos, though.