The whole wide picture
Can't fit everything in one photograph? These apps can help you click some good-looking panoramas
Many smartphone cameras come with the ability to take decent panorama shots, but usually some or the other element is missing. For one, you can’t put the phone in auto-mode to take a panoramic selfie, which is the thing to do while clicking yourself. And though you might take that mind-blowing panorama, you can’t really share it with your friends, for when it uploads on any social media site, it will show as a tiny, thin strip in a single photo-frame.
If you are keen on shooting panoramas on your phone and in editing and showcasing them, as well as sharing them from within the app, consider these options.
Twister
Updated this month, Twister enables you to capture, manage, edit and share panoramas, photographs and videos. The app auto- corrects the fuzziness that can sometimes be seen in panoramas and helps you take the perfect landscape picture.
It also comes with an interesting feature of auto-rotating the phone when it’s kept upright on a flat surface by activating the phone’s vibration, eventually capturing the panoramas around it. This is something very few apps currently offer. You can also take panorama selfies with friends and family and walk around people or objects to take their image from all angles. Once done, the panoramas can be shared on social networks or with friends and family via a link to a Web gallery and an embedded Flash player. Give it voice commands and it will hear, or pause a video recording and resume again.
The app is available for iOS. It is expected to be launched for Android and Windows Marketplace in a few months.
www.gettwister.com; $0.99 (around ₹ 60) for iOS
Photaf Panorama
Once you have clicked a panorama, you can share it directly on Facebook or export it to the phone’s gallery folder. There is also the option of uploading to Photaf’s flash-based website to dynamically move the panorama sideways for better viewing, somewhat like the way Google Street View worked.
www.photaf.com; basic version, free, and Pro version, for Android, ₹ 235
AutoStitch Panorama
The app works by stitching together a random collection of images, automatically finding matches using a preset algorithm, created by developers at the UK’s University of Bath. It aligns all the pieces of the puzzle and puts them together to show the complete picture in any arrangement you want: vertical, horizontal or mixed. Its Pro version can click full-resolution camera images of up to 20 megapixels and uses advanced blending modes for seamless panoramas.
The Android app was launched in April and for the next update, the company plans to improve the stitching quality and add a feature to stitch scans of large documents too.
www.cloudburstresearch.com; basic app, free, and Pro version, for iOS and Android, $1.99
PanoPerfect
www.panoperfect.co; free for iOS
Cycloramic
www.cycloramic.com; $1.99 on iOS
Selfie360
The last update for the iOS app was in May, while the Android app was updated in April. With the next update expected soon, the app makers plan to introduce new capture moves for group selfies as well as other features.
www.selfie360app.com; free on iOS and Android
Pixeet 360
www.pixeet.com; free for iOS and Android. Pro account costs $19.99 per month.
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First Published:15 Jul 2014, 08:29 PM IST
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