Cult Favorite: i2KQuickage Revolutionary Panorama Software

What it is: i2KQuickage is curiously named but unbelievably powerful photo panorama software from the genius minds at DualAlign, software developers whose primary markets have long been medical communities and defense sorts. There’s no reason to keep this software’s incredible charms from the broader photography market, though – it gives even the humblest talents and rigs (such as those possessed by this reviewer) the power to make arresting panoramic images with just one click of the mouse.

Why it’s cool: If you ever spent time using photo editing software to stitch together several photos into a panorama, you likely praised the heavens with the arrival of auto-stitching and panorama tools to Photoshop. But even Photoshop users — and users of other specialized software such as Double Take, which integrates well with both Aperture and iPhoto — still have to deal with quite a number of considerations to get the job done. Image registration, correction for exposure anomalies across the range of images used to build a panorama, distortion correction, seam selection and blending, and final image processing — Photoshop, Double Take and other solutions all require multiple user choices and steps to achieve optimal results.

i2KQuickage ends all that. Its proprietary algorithms produce stunning panoramas — with the user’s responsibility being no more than selecting the images to be used and clicking the “Create Montage” button. Even using images captured with a camera set in the “Auto” mode, which can led to dramatic differences in illumination and exposure between
images, even with movement of people and natural phenomena (such as waves on a beach) in the photos, the results produced by i2KQuickage are outstanding.

i2KQuickage has a few Preferences settings for tweaking layout and crop options, and images can be output as JPEG, TIFF or PNG in the Pro version of the software, but the results obtained from the Default/Auto settings simply speak for themselves.

Each of the images used to compile the panoramas in the accompanying gallery was shot handheld, with absolutely no professional lighting equipment and no post-production other than cropping and a bit of saturation adjustment to the final images.

Where to Get It: Learn more about i2KQuickage at the Dualalign website, check out the Free Trial or purchase the Express version for $49.95 (output to JPEG only) or the Pro version (includes output to 16bit High Dynamic Range images) for $99.95.