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Cool 360 allows you to take photos and then stitch them together into either a proprietary format. The purchased version allows you to save the files in an MOV format. The program works pretty well overall.

The way it works is that you take a series of photographs using a tripod. You overlap the photos when you take the and the software stitches everything together in a 360 degree panorama.

There are a few tips that will help you get better panaromas.

• Use a camera where you know the focal length. You need to set the software to the focal length of your camera. If you have a zoom camera that doesn’t indicate the exact intermediate focal lengths, then zoom all the way in or out. Usually you will know the minimum and maximum focal lengths of a zoom lens.

• Only shoot 360 degrees. You don't need to shoot past 360 degrees. If you do you will need to choose only the pictures that make up the 360 degree view.

• Put a copy of the pictures that you are going to use for the panorama in a separate folder. That will make our editing job a lot easier.

• Purchase the regular license. The trial version only supports their proprietary format. The purchased version, as we noted earlier, will allow you to save in a MOV format. With the proprietary format, you viewers would have to download the proprietary viewer. Many web visitors are reluctant to download software that they are not familiar with.

• Use a good tripod and level it. The software can correct a lot of your mistakes but there are limitations. IF you can, get a tripod with a level bubble to ensure that the camera is completely level. Try not to shoot on a windy day. The panoramas that we have up on our cape may site were shot with 30 mph winds with 40 mph gusts ( a northeast Gale) The quality suffered accordingly

• Make sure that you have plenty of overlap when you shoot the individual shots. If you have a gap, you cannot fix that in the digital darkroom. If you have too much overlap the program will usually adjust OK

• If you have a wide range of lighting at your subject you might want to turn the flash off or always on. A sudden change in lighting will look terrible int he finished product.

• You can edit the individual frames if you are careful. The best bet is to set things up when you are shooting the pics. For example, we wanted to shoot the homes and promenade at cape may. The house at the ‘center’ of the panorama had cars parked in front of it. We made sure that would be one full frame. That way we could edit the cars out of one pic and then stitch the other pics in. In some cases, you might need to edit more than one frame.

• If the resulting MOV file is too large, we have found that running a bulk resizer such as pic sizer will make the original jpgs smaller which will result in a smaller MOV file.

• If you put a panorama on your website, be sure to include plenty of descriptive text. This will help search engines find your work. You also need to consider the bandwidth that a panorama will use. You might want to check your logs periodically to make sure that no one is hotlinking to your work.

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