Time Saving Tuesday
Windows only 
I’ve always felt like there hasn’t been a perfect tool out there for the average person who wants to shoot panoramic shots, and doesn’t want to spend ages assembling them on their machine. One of the last tools that we covered on the site was Hugin, but you could spend hours tweaking settings trying to get things just right. It just wasn’t something the most people would want to fiddle with.
Over in our forum Tony pointed out an amazing tool that Microsoft provides for free called the Image Composite Editor (ICE). Sure Microsoft has already incorporated panoramic creation capabilities in Windows Live Photo Gallery, but having this standalone app gives you a few more features.
I guess the real question is how well does it work, and how much effort will you have to put into stitching your photos together. I tried the program on several different panoramic shots that I’ve taken over the years, and it turned out some of the best results. Ironically enough it’s also one of the easiest programs I’ve ever used for this type of task.
When you first get Microsoft ICE up and running you should see something like this:
(Click to Enlarge)
All you have to do is drag and drop the photos you want stitched together into the gray area. The program will then go to work trying to figure out the best way to assemble them, and once it’s done you’ll see a preview of the result:
(Click to Enlarge)
That’s really all there is to it. There are different types of stitches that can be done including rotating motion or planar motion, and the image can be cropped to your liking by adjusting the box that appears around the panoramic shot. The best part, however, might be the variety of formats you can save the panoramic in:
- JPEG
- TIFF
- Photoshop
- HD View Tileset
- Deep Zoom Tileset
- BMP
- PNG
- HD Photo Image
Now you don’t have much of an excuse as to why you still have some photos laying around that you haven’t stitched together!
These are the types of products that people will use. Direct to the point and easy to use. I will try it this afternoon with some photos I took of the Panama Canal.
Thanks a lot, Ryan.
Omar.-
Hi Ryan, this simple tool sounds interesting. Thanks. However, i always find this [robinmalau1.googlepages.com] I reinstall a couple of times, restart the computer and it’s all the same.
Do you know any support forum for the software anywhere?
Thanks again.
@Robin
Have you try it using different set of files? Maybe your image is corrupted.
[cybernetnews.com] the files are fine. But nevermind, i tried out Panorama Studio and i guess all works fine now.
I installed ICE last friday. For simple panoramic effects, the result seems to have a better rendering than “autostitch”, a small utility I think you made a note on. Anyway, thanks for this presentation. People will like this MS product.
No, unfortunately I don’t know where you can get help to solve your problem. Judging by the error message I’d say that the app just wasn’t able to stitch together those photos because there isn’t enough overlap.