Image Composite Editor

The first panoramic pictures were taken back in the 1800’s, but that doesn’t mean this type of photographs have lost their appeal. Microsoft Image Composite Editor is a light tool that can help you create wide pictures by merging several files.
The software has a clean interface that focuses on the image you’re creating and the main settings you can adjust.
The app can create three types of panoramas: simple, structured and video. The first two require loading at least two photographs. The program supports a wide range of image formats, such as BMP, ICO, GIF, JPEG, JPG, PNG and TIFF.
Then, you can choose the image layout by adjusting the direction of the photos, the angular range and, if there are more than two pictures, the image order (serpentine or zigzag). Also, you can adjust the overlap and alignment.
Video panoramas can be created by loading one of the supported formats: 3G2, 3GP, AVI, M4V, MOV, MP4 and WMV. The software enables you to play the video and choose a starting and stopping time for your selection or draw rectangles around regions of the video frames that you want to preserve in the final panorama.
Final alterations can then be made. You can choose one of the stitching options (planar motion, rotating motion or automatic), crop the image, choose an export format and a few scaling options.
Some orientation settings are also available. Thus, you can move the image around and select the panoramic angle.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft Image Composite Editor is a powerful, yet simple tool that is extremely easy to use. Inexperienced users shouldn’t have problems in figuring out all the software’s features.