Take Cool Panoramic iPhone Photos With Pano
While your snobbier Flickr friends might consider it a bit of a novelty, Pano, a new app for the iPhone, makes taking extreme wide-angle panoramic photographs a total breeze. The $3 application from Debacle Software is available for 3G iPhones [Update: and first-gen iPhones with 2.1 software] through the App Store now (here’s a link).
Pano does the bulk of the work in-camera, helping you align each photo as you shoot so there’s less stitching and repair to do later. You start by snapping the left-most photo in your panorama. Then, when you take the next picture, you’ll see a ghostly sliver of the previous image’s right edge superimposed over the left edge of your iPhone’s screen. This translucent guide of about half and inch or so helps you line up the objects in the frame. When you’ve gotten the objects as close as you can to overlapping (it won’t be perfect — there’s some lens distortion inherent in the iPhone’s camera) you snap the second photo. You can stop there at two images or continue shooting until you have a four-shot panorama. You can also preview and reshoot images mid-sequence if you want — useful if a pedestrian or a car sneaks into your pristine nature scene.
When you’re done, Pano merges your pieces together, performing the image blending as well as some auto color correction. The result is dumped into your iPhone’s photo roll.
In our tests, the shots turned out better than we expected. There’s some ghosting and double images where objects in the background didn’t line up perfectly, but with some practice, we were able to get a few seamless shots. The final image quality could be better, but the resolution is good enough for posting to the web. There are some caveats and hints in the FAQ.
A panoramic view of the Wired.com office is at the top of this post. Here’s another view of the office and a shot of San Francisco’s sleepy Third street.
You can view larger versions on Flickr (one, two, three).
The software was created by a trio of programmers in their mid-20s. One of Pano’s developers, Julian Lepinski, wrote in to tell us that he and two of his friends have been working on the app for the past month and a half in their spare time. One of his partners, a mathematics grad student, wrote the image processing algorithms. The other, a graphic designer, did the user interface. Julian, himself a grad student in human-computer interaction, worked on getting the app onto the iPhone.
For a $3 app utilizing a cameraphone that fits in your pocket, Pano is very cool. Granted, the iPhone’s tiny camera is fairly limited, and as far as quality and functionality go, Pano is definitely on the amateur end of the spectrum. You could achieve some mind blowing, frame-worthy results using a DSLR and one of those fancy photo-stitching plug-ins for Photoshop that costs several hundreds of dollars. But for iPhone-toting photophiles with an eye for experimentation, Pano is a bargain.
The Debacle Software crew is actively developing the app, so we should expect frequent updates. There’s also a Flickr group for Pano fans.
