Pangea Software has released PanoPreviewer, a free Photoshop plug-in designed for photographers who work with 360-degree Virtual Reality (VR) panoramas. The software lets you preview “equirectangular” panorama images in Photoshop directly, rather than having to use an intermediary application, and it uses OpenGL for maximum performance.
“Normally when editing an equirectangular image you’re constantly saving the file out and loading it into a utility like CubicConverter so that you can preview it and see what needs touching up. With PanoPreviewer the tedium of that process has been eliminated since you can now preview the pano right in Photoshop,” reads information from the PanoPreviewer Web page.
This is Pangea’s second major release of a VR-related software tool PanoPreviewer follows the introduction of PangeaVR, a Web browser plug-in that enables VR panoramas to by hardware-accelerated using OpenGL (normally, they rendered in software only using QuickTime).
Pangea Software is best known to Mac users as the developer behind games like Bugdom, Nanosaur and Otto Matic. The company recently turned its attention to panoramic photography services.
PanoPreviewer’s system requirements call for any version of Photoshop running on Mac OS X, and an OpenGL-based graphics card (the more VRAM the better, according to the developer).