Panoramic photography is something I’ve been playing with for years — long enough that Prairie was amused to see that I was taking multi-shot panoramics back when I visited Europe during my high school years, long before I had any way to assemble them together with anything more sophisticated than scissors and tape.
Unfortunately, the state of panoramic software on the Mac has been less than I’d like for quite some time now. Apple’s excellent Quicktime VR Authoring Studio is long out of date, without any sign of it being updated for OS X (in fact, searching for it on Apple’s site only returns references to it, with no official product page listed). Canon’s Photostitch is used fairly frequently, but I’ve never been that thrilled with it. Functional, but it doesn’t really “feel” like a true OS X application, and it doesn’t allow for much tweaking or fine-tuning. Other Mac OS X panoramic tools are either commercial and expensive, or command-line ports that I’ve never taken the time to investigate fully (such as Panorama Tools). For a time when I had a working PC I used The Panorama Factory and was quite happy with its range of options, but since my PC finally gave up the ghost, TPF’s performance under Virtual PC wasn’t good enough for me to continue using it.
For the past year or so, though, I’ve been keeping an eye out on AutoStitch. It looked to be the “holy grail” of panoramic creation software: originally created as a research project at the University of British Columbia, it produces truly automatic panoramic photos, stitched from multiple photos that don’t even have to be aligned or all taken with the same exposure (a 57-shot example is shown on the AutoStitch page). The problem, of course, was that AutoStitch is PC-only. Still, I kept seeing incredible panoramas that AutoStitch had produced, so I’d occasionally check in to see if a Mac OS X port had popped up yet.
This morning, my persistence paid off. I’m not sure when it first appeared, but Kekus Digital has produced a pseudo-port of AutoStitch for Mac OS X (licensing the AutoStitch technology in a Mac OS X package) called Calico.