Calico — worth 39 bucks?

So, I’ve downloaded some pretty neat software. What it does is connect together those panorama shots you take with a digital camera. You know what I’m talking about, when you see a landscape that’s simply too big to capture with one shot, so you take a series of photos, moving the camera a little bit with each shot, with the idea of putting them all together later.

You’d think it was a simple matter to do it — just line up the pictures in Photoshop. Should take a couple minutes, tops. But there are problems. The lens distorts the picture, so where you think they should actually match up doesn’t really match. You might have rotated the camera a degree or two to one side. The exposure isn’t exactly the same on each photo.

That’s where Calico comes in. Yes, there’s lots of panorama software out there, and I’ve tried several of the options. But I’ve never found one as easy to use as Calico. You just load each of the panorama photos in, then click on “make,” and after a couple minutes of hard thinking (on the computer’s part, not yours), you’re done — it makes a beautiful panorama, every time.

The only problem, as I’ve hinted oh-so-subtly with the headline to this post, is that such ease of use doesn’t come free. It costs $39. Now, $39 isn’t a lot of money, but this is also not a program I’d be using every day. I think I attempted a total of three panoramas during the course of my entire summer’s travels. But take a look at the results:

You can click on the image for a larger version. As you can see, Calico watermarks the picture to tempt me into ponying up the $39. I’ll let my readership be the judge — is it worth $39 to be able to generate unblemished photos like this? Let me know in the comments.