FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
        John Strait
        Smoky City Design, LLC
        jstrait @ smokycity.com
        http://www.panoramafactory.com

The Panorama Factory™ V4 Released

Pittsburgh, PA - October 17, 2005--Smoky City Design, LLC today released version 4.0 of The Panorama Factory, its popular software product for creating panoramic images. The quality of images produced by The Panorama Factory has been significantly improved and new stitching methods were added to accept images with camera rotation or tilt. Other improvements include: controls for initial view and automatic rotation of VR viewers (QTVR, IVR, PTViewer); export to layered Photoshop PSD format; and restart of the stitching Wizard on previously stitched panoramas.

Pricing and availability

A 30-day trial of The Panorama Factory version 4.0 may be downloaded from www.panoramafactory.com. Purchasing a registration key at The Panorama Factory web site converts the trial version to the full version. The full price of a new license for The Panorama Factory is $69.95. The upgrade price for current customers who own a registration key for V3 is $29.95. An introductory special, valid until November 30, 2005, reduces the price of a new license to $59.95 and the version upgrade to $24.95.

Image quality improvements

Bicubic interpolation is now used for warping, cropping, etc. This produces higher quality images and reduces stitching time by removing the need for post processing the image with the Improve quality command.

Lanczos2 interpolation is now used for resizing images. This produces higher quality resized images and is faster than the V3 resizing method.

Improvements to the fine tuning computation (with no user interface changes) make the effect of the fine tuning regions more stable and more localized. The result is an improvement in sharpness for many images.

Final image sharpening is now done with Unsharp Masking which is higher quality and faster than the V3 method.

Camera rotation and tilt

Fully automatic stitching now automatically corrects for small camera rotations (roll axis).

Stitching with "stitch points" is available as an alternative to fully automatic stitching. Stitching points enable images with camera rotation (roll axis, up to 30 degrees) and tilt (pitch axis, up to 60 degrees), even if the rotation angles are different for each photo. This makes it possible to do hand-held panoramas and panoramas with the camera tilted up or down.

A perspective correction option has been added to the crop command. This makes it possible to produce images that have conventional perspective. In other words, these images do not exhibit "panoramic distortion". On the contrary, perspective correction preserves straight lines.

About The Panorama Factory

The Panorama Factory creates high-quality panoramas from a set of overlapping digital images. The Panorama Factory transforms (warps) the images in order to join them seamlessly into panoramas whose fields of view can range up to 360 degrees. The software also corrects for lens-induced distortions and creates either cylindrical or spherical image projections.

The Panorama Factory creates images that rival those made by expensive rotational and swing-lens panoramic cameras. Not only can The Panorama Factory facilitate creation of immersive VR worlds, it also provides features for the fine-art panoramic photographer who wishes to work from ordinary 35mm images or images captured with a digital camera.

System requirements

Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 or XP; 64 MB RAM, more for better performance; 166 MHz processor, faster for better performance, 800 x 600 display minimum; High color (16 bit) minimum, true color (24 or 32 bit) recommended; Installed web browser for online help; 25 MB free disk space for installation.

For Additional Information

For additional information about The Panorama Factory, visit www.panoramafactory.com