Rectilinear Panorama, Photoshop plug-in to make panoramic photos straight, announced

Altostorm Software, a developer of image processing software, today announces the release of version 1.2 of Rectilinear Panorama. Designed as a filter plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, and other compatible image editors, Rectilinear Panorama gives you a pain-free ability to correct different types of geometric image distortions, including lens, perspective and panorama distortions. Along with panoramic images, the filter can process non-panoramic ones, be they scans or digital photos. Thanks to the unique image transformation technology and definition system of visual distortions, Rectilinear Panorama helps you recover original object shapes almost hands down, leaving the need for manual configuration of settings behind the scene.

The idea for Rectilinear Panorama was inspired by a life situation. "First, we thought about making such software in 2003, when our company was working on one of the commercial contracts," says Sergey Kolodkin, CEO of Altostorm Software, and author of Rectilinear Panorama. "As a part of that project, we had to photograph the front of one very long building. It was impossible to take a photo from a long distance, because the building was surrounded by trees and a fence. A close panoramic photography allowed us to shoot this building without the trees and fence, but there were considerable distortions, which our client didn't like. If we'd had Rectilinear Panorama, it would have been of a great assistance to us those days."

Rectilinear Panorama at a Glance
Correcting images with Rectilinear Panorama is remarkably easy and does not require any advanced knowledge of perspective, or geometry. This ease first comes with the user interface, which is designed as a step-by-step wizard that guides you through an entire recovery in a point-and-click fashion. You can open the filter with a click on the "Altostorm" option from the "Filter" menu of Adobe Photoshop. Rectilinear Panorama takes you through 4 correction stages, from defining distortions, specifying required geometry of an output and adding compensations all the way to generating a corrected image.
Changes in the settings are immediately reflected in the image, which is displayed in the preview area. The program does all image tansformations in a single pass. This saves your image from multiple interpolations.

What Customers Say
Rectilinear Panorama 1.2 builds on the success of its previous release. Here's what its customers say about it. "Panoramic photography is always a pain," says Richard Dyrrant, a photographer from San Francisco. "To create a good panoramic photo is a very complicated task without a detailed preparation and sometimes even prepared, you won't get what you or your client really wants. Not always I have a tripod at hand and a small camera tilt is detrimental for such photos. It is almost impossible to get pictures of urban landscape, interior scenes, large groups of people and other big objects in their true value. Using Rectilinear Panorama I can correct optical and sometimes my mistakes with several mouse clicks!"

Pricing and Availability
Altostorm Rectilinear Panorama 1.2 runs under Windows NT/2000/2003/XP and distributed as a professional edition, $179, and a home edition, $69. Additional information on the package content is available from www.altostorm.com/purchase. Registered customers are entitled to free updates and technical support. An evaluation version of the program is available as a free download at www.altostorm.com/download.