YOU can do a perfect job of assembling the images in PS -- better than any phot-assembler program, and once you get the hang of it it takes only a few minutes.
Nevertheless, I do need to practise assembling images in PS because IA has a resulting file size limitations of around 400MB. It would be a nightmare stitching 60x20D images in PS individually. But merging 3 or 4 groups, prestitched in IA, should be easily manageable.
Actually, the good stitching programs do *lots more* than just line up the pixels, such as you might do with Photoshop. I'm not familiar with Image Assembler, but I suspect it's similar to PTMac. (Although PTMac doesn't have that file size limitation.)
And, to keep on-topic, I would say that trying out Panorama Tools (and its Mac front-end, PTMac) is my best tip of the year! Windows users can also use Panorama Tools with a variety of front-end software such as PTGui.
PTMac lets you mark "control points" in your images for stitching. But you also tell PTMac about the lens you were using, so it knows about the field of view. It uses this information to compute how to "project" your images onto the surface of a sphere, that represents how the actual scene should have appeared (imagine yourself at the center of a sphere, looking out at the world).
You then tell PTMac what "projection" to use, e.g. rectilinear if you're making a flat print, or cylindrical if you're making a Quicktime VR panorama. The software projects the image from thesphere outward, onto the flat "paper" beyond. This is exactly the same as a map maker projecting a globe onto a flat surface, e.g. Mercator projections.
With all this power, PTMac can also take out lens distortion (e.g. barrel distortion) and chromatic aberrations.
Once you're satisfied with your settings, you tell PTMac to create the panorama, and it goes to work - sometimes for quite a long time. The good thing is, it determines the correct mathematical transformation, and applies it only once to each pixel, thus minimizing any possible image degradation that might come from repeatedly changing your pixels.
In any case, the results are quite remarkable - and much more realistic than simply tacking images together in Photoshop. You might like to take a look at some links.
A Luminous Landscape Discussion:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial...panoramas.shtmlHere’s a great tutorial on the use of Panorama Tools and related software:
http://epaperpress.com/pano/And here is a good explanation of “projections”.
http://epaperpress.com/pano/proIntro.htmlI hope you take the time to more fully explore panorama-creating with one of the best tools out there.
Enjoy!
-- Jim