Releases, Releases.

Somehow the end of the Gregorian calendar year seems to be a popular time for software releases. There have been a number of interesting releases in the past two weeks in the area of Free photography in general and panorama making in particular. Too many to mention them all.

The one that caught my attention is PTStitcherNG 3.0b by Prof. Dr. Helmut Dersch. Helmut has been at the forefront of panorama making software for more than a decade now, and his new tool optimizes for speed and memory footprint. A 1.5 gigapixel panorama will stitch within less than 100MB RAM. To me this comes very convenient: since I upgraded my photo gear the resulting images are too big to stitch on my ailing notebook maxed out on RAM.

Unfortunately for the time being it is free and not Free. Binaries are freely available for Windows, OSX, and OpenSuse 11.1 (x86_64). Users of Linux distributions other than OpenSuse will need to run the Windows binary through Wine and take a 30% performance hit. The currently distributed binaries only work on SSE3 processors. Helmut says that a source code release is pending the scientific publication of his results. For the Pentium M / Ubuntu 9.04 notebook whose life I’m trying to extend beyond shelf-date  I’ll have to wait for SSE2 binaries or for the source code. I worked around it by rsyncing the source images to my Kubuntu 9.10 office workstation and running PTStitcherNG there, remotely.

Another notable release is Enblend-Enfuse 4.0 that has been overhauled by Christoph Spiel and has spurned a release of newer versions of related GUIs,   ImageFuser0.7.4 by Harry van der Wolf and EnfuseGUI 2.1 by Ingemar Bergmark.

Last but not least, Bruno released Hugin 2009.4.0. completing the work I left unfinished, and started the release cycle for 2010.0.0. James topped the Holiday present by merging into trunk the much awaited new layout branch, with his Google Summer of Code project and Pablo’s XYZ  parameters for image position.