Plug-ins released for PanoTools

Kekus Digital LLC, which makes graphics utilities for the Mac, has released Mac OS X Photoshop 7 plug-ins for Helmut Dersch’s PanoTools. The plug-ins, which cost US$39.95 for a set of four, include options for correcting lens distortions, re-mapping panorama types, changing the viewing angle of an image and extracting corrected images from spherical panoramas.

The four plug-ins are:

Adjust: for extracting or inserting corrected images to and from panoramas;

Correct: for fixing distortions caused by lens imperfections and scanning misalignments including: radial, vertical and horizontal shift, shear, scale, radial luminance, cut frame and fourier filters;

Perspective: for changing the viewing angle of an image;

Remap: for converting panorama types including normal, cylindrical QTVR, spherical, fisheye and convex mirror.

Barrel and pincushion distortions found in many lenses can be corrected using the radial shift filter that can adjust the red, green and blue channels separately if you wish. What’s more, the light fall off that commonly occurs near the edges of wide angle lenses can be corrected with the radial luminance filter. You can download the plug-ins at the Kekus Web site.

PanoTools creates panoramas (cubic, cylindrical, and flat). The $49.95 app works on Mac OS 8.6 and higher, including Mac OS X. It also can be downloaded from the Kekus site.