Microsoft Might Be Onto Something...

Some of you people might have noticed a Microsoft Ad that's been making rounds lately. You know, little cute girl, digital camera, taking panoramic shots and stitching them together effortlessly with Windows Live Photo Gallery. And as much as I find the "I'm a PC" ads fairly empty, this one caught my eye.

Panoramic Compositing has always been something I've been meaning to do, but doing it on Photoshop is utterly mind-numbing and time consuming. I'd even tried enlisting Brett to help me, but of course, he's all over the place in terms of attention span (I mean that in the nicest way possible, Brett). So I bit the bullet and decided to try Windows Live, despite loving my Mac. The results are, in short, amazing for a freely downloaded program with a simple interface (And a Microsoft program, at that).

Yes, there are mistakes here and there, but as a whole the impressions of my images were faithfully rendered. It took maybe about a minute for WL Photo Gallery to composite my pictures (about 5-8 2000x3000 JPEGs) and that's thoroughly acceptable in my opinion, considering doing a single one of those myself took 40+ minutes. And that's without the post-processing and tweaking that Brett would've wanted to do.

In conclusion, this is one feature that Microsoft maybe has the right to be bragging about. They've been working hard to improve their user experience and this makes their Windows Live suite slightly more formidable in the face of suites like iLife '09 (though that has Face-Recognition, which is even more drool-worthy than panoramic stitching).