My favourite free photography tool of all time, Microsoft Image Composite Editor (related to Microsoft Photosynth on mobile devices), has been updated with significant updates.

ICE was first released in 2008 and has been updated a few times since, before entering what seemed to be a hibernation period. I am truly delighted that this update has been made.

There are a number of new key features, including :

• Automatic image completion, where gaps that would otherwise leave black spaces in your final image, or force you to crop it closer than you would like, can now be “auto completed” using some smart new algorithms. You can see this in action in the demo video and it really is cool
• The application is now more forgiving, select the wrong option or decide you don’t like what you have selected and you don’t have to start it all over. Just press back and give it another go.
• The video to panorama feature introduced last time around has been improved. You can now select key frames from the video and have them stitched together to give you wonderful panoramas with the person in the video appearing across your final image. Looks great for action sports.
• A new series of lenses (projections) have been added providing for a number of different effects such as fish-eye, spherical, orthographic or stereographic amongst others.
• 32 bit and 64 bit versions available (hopefully no more running out of RAM)

Your final images can still be exported in a number of different formats including JPEG, TIFF and Photoshop PSD/PSB as well as special multi-resolution tiled formats used by HD View and Deep Zoom. You can also still upload your panoramas for 3D viewing on the Photosynth website.

You can download the new MS Ice here : Project ICE

 

Tags: MS Ice, Photography, photosynth

Categories: Fun things to do, Photography

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