#comments

This is a complete rewrite of my original review, updated to account for the latest versions and the addition of PanoLab Pro.

So I’ve been playing around with the latest versions of these apps, Pano (v2.0), PanoLab (v1.1) and PanoLab Pro (v1.1) for awhile now (I have the very good fortune to have been able to use an early version of Pano 2.0). My executive summary is that you should try them both out and definitely go and take a look at their flickr pages (Pano’s and PanoLab’s) to get an idea of what their end results are. Both are excellent and very different applications, but I reach for Pano everytime.

Overview

The PanoLab applications are very flexible applications, they allow you freeform placement of photos on your canvas, place them side by side or above or below. Basically you take whatever pictures you want and collage them together – I don’t know what the maximum number of pictures is, but it must be quite a bit because I’ve never been asked to stop. The primary difference between the the basic and pro version is that in Pro you have the ability to fidget with the exposure and color which goes a very long way to making the end result seem more photo-ey and less collage-ey. Although some may appreciate the old school collage look you used to get pasting your prints together.

Pano, on the other hand is much more focused than PanoLab. Pano wants you to make panoramas and it’s going to tell you how to do that – you start at the leftmost point (or the bottom most if you are going to take a vertical shot), you decide if you want to shoot the pictures in landscape or portrait mode and then you just take the pictures. Once those decisions are made your fate is sealed, each successive shot lines up with the previous so you make no more decisions (except when to stop). For me though, it is precisely this restriction that has me going back to Pano again and again. Its simplicity, I believe, is its strength.

The Good

PanoLab is much more freeform and in many ways a more powerful application than Pano from a user control perspective. It gives you almost no restrictions on the type of pictures you take. Tall, wide, both, it handles it all with equal aplomb. Even after taking and accepting pictures it allows you to shuffle them in layers. It helps to think of this as actually creating a collage of print photos – PanoLab lets you adjust which pictures get put in front of the others at any time. Very, very convenient.

PanoLab Pro gives you some extra adjustments – you can adjust the exposure of the photos as well as the colors. While it seems to give you some fancy sliders and what not for more specific control all my experiments with that ended in abject failure – fortunately there’s an “auto” button that lets you tap another adjacent picture and PanoLab figures out the best settings to make them as seamless as possible. This worked quite well in my experience.

Pano, on the other hand shines in its photo stitching. Since all your photos taken overlap with its neighbors in very specific ways the application is able to work some kind of deep voodoo and it adjusts and crops the photos as necessary to make the end result seem seamless. In some photos (usually of distant subjects) you honestly can’t find the seams at all, so good is the work here. As I said above, for me the limitations of this application is its strength once you start thinking in Pano terms it’s very easy to see great photos that you want to take. It just happens.

The Bad

There’s two things I don’t like about PanoLab. One is that with so many decisions and so few restrictions to make it takes me a long time to make a PanoLab photo. And with the slowness of the iPhones camera, that means quite a long time. It’s hard for me to visualize the final product I’m trying to make. This is probably a limitation of my weak brain because you see some amazing shots in their flickr page. But there it is.

The other thing I don’t love are the seams. While the exposure compensation found in Pro goes a good way towards addressing the issue, it still exists. Again, though, some people actively like the nearly analog feel of the end results. Personal preferences.

There’s little I don’t like about Pano. Stupid interface problems like having to hit the “cancel” button to bring up the menu to get to some settings. It does this weird thing where after you take one panel it shows the photo to you, but seemingly expanded so you don’t see the full photo. Odd, right? It’d be nice to see 100% of the photo taken as well as optional an optional overlay so you can see if you captured the right overlap. Also, now that they created the portrait mode option (the one I use almost exclusively) it’d be nice to see a right to left option so you can start at the right most shot instead of always the left.

The Conclusion

As you can see I have a strong personal preference for Pano. Nevertheless, I think that both applications are excellent and easily recommend that you check out both – definitely look at the flickr pages and see which you prefer. PanoLab is free (Pro is $4.99) so you can always check that out – it’s the one I started on. Let me know what you think or if you’re using a different app for your panoramic needs.

You can see some of my shots in my contributions to the flickr groups, lots more in the Pano group than the PanoLab group.