PTGui vs stitching

PTGui stitches photographs into panoramic images, including spherical panoramas that cover 360° × 180°. It can detect overlap between photos and join multiple rows, including images made with fisheye lenses. Manual stitching, a live preview, and a perspective editor provide additional control. On supported hardware, OpenCL can accelerate stitching with the GPU. PTGui accepts JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and camera RAW source images; listed output formats include JPEG, TIFF, Photoshop, and DNG. The Pro edition adds HDR stitching, masking, viewpoint correction, exposure fusion, and a patch tool. PTGui runs on Linux, macOS 10.15 or later, and Windows 10 build 18362 or later. It processes photos, projects, and templates on the user's computer and primarily works offline; HTTPS is used for optional update checks, license activation, and opt-in crash reports. The fully functional trial has no time limit, but exported panoramas carry a visible watermark. Personal licenses include one year of upgrades. Technical support is through a public forum, not email or telephone.

stitching is a free Python package for making panoramas from image files or images already loaded in a program. It is based on OpenCV’s stitching module and can be used through a command-line interface or from Python scripts. The CLI can process JPG files in a directory, images selected with a wildcard, or explicitly named files; the Python API provides Stitcher and AffineStitcher classes. Stitcher accepts custom settings, and AffineStitcher corresponds to the CLI’s affine option. For troubleshooting, verbose mode saves intermediate results, while supplied utilities and a Jupyter Notebook tutorial help inspect RANSAC matches and blended seam lines. The package can be installed with pip or run from the openstitching/stitch Docker image. In Docker, images are read from a mounted /data directory and the default output is result.jpg in that directory. The project recommends stitching-headless for server and cloud environments. It is Python 3 only and distributed under the Apache License 2.0. PyPI lists version 0.7.0, released September 5, 2026.