One is Joost Nieuwenhuijse, from the Netherlands, who has created the stitching tool "PTGui," which many VR photographers, myself included, feel is the best stitching tool available at this time.

And the other is Thomas Rauscher, from Germany, who has created Pano2VR, a wonderful program for warping the stitched pano and outputting it in the proper format for viewing in either Apple's Quicktime or Adobe's Flash.

Apple has not been supporting the VR element of Quicktime as intensively as they should, so the addition of a Flash output was very welcome and a great addition to our toolbox.

So, thank you to Joost and Thomas!

Stitching in PTGui is a cinch! Even sets of multi row images go together easily. You just load the images and PTGui does the rest! You can download PTGui and purchase a license at: ptgui.com

After you have the panoramic image stitched, you then import that image into Pano2VR to create the final output which can be viewed in QuickTime or Flash. The Flash viewer has some really neat features, like a smooth start and stop that QuickTime's VR player just can't match. I am in the process of converting all my work from QuickTime to Flash. You can download Pano2VR and purchase a license at: Garden Gnome Software

There is always a step between those two functions, stitching and warping, where I bring the stitched image into Photoshop and remove imperfections and get the colors and other image characteristics corrected. I always work on the stitched image because it is important that the raw images you import to PTGui be as similar as possible. I don't change exposure settings between shots when shooting a panorama either. I have my camera set on manual and leave the settings constant all the way around. Otherwise you get variations in exposure that show up as banding in your finished output.

The Pano2VR interface is clean and simple and is self explanatory and easy to use.