Canon includes photo-stitching software with its cameras, so there is no need to buy it. Nevertheless, I was interested to know if commercial software offered features that Canon's did not. I downloaded a trial version (full function; limited to 15 days) of Ulead's COOL 360 (after registration).
(Some cameras, such as Sonys, don't help you with photo-stitching, so you would need to carefully take the overlapping photos, and then buy software to stictch together the software.)
I've used ULEAD's video editing software, whose user interface I don't care for. Cool 360 has a similar interface, with "projects" and non-obvious buttons. (Click image at left.) Projects make it easy to access the JPG files I used to create a stitched-image; but I find I never go back to re-do stitching, so creating projects just gets in my way.
Nevertheless, I opened five photos I took last weekend at Galiano Island's Montegue Harbour. One advantage of ULead over Canon's PhotoStitch is that I can adjust each image of the series -- or maybe not. Because Canon keeps the same exposure settings for every image, these individualized settings are not helpful.
It is hard to see all the images, because (1) the Cool 360 window is fixed at 1024x768; and (2) there is no zoom function. Also missing is the crop tool, necessary because the resulting stitched image is not a perfect rectangle.
This software makes no sense for Canon S1iS owners. Download price is US$40.
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