Cool 360 Description:

Stitch your photos together to produce an impressive panorama--or a 360-degree virtual reality scene--with Cool 360. Cool 360 uses information about your camera lens to get the best result when it stitches images together; there's a long list of cameras, but if yours isn't included you can fill in the details. As with many Ulead programs, you don't get menus; instead there's a three-button toolbar across the screen with separate controls for starting a project, adjusting the alignment of the images, and saving the final image. The automatic alignment is pretty good, and you can change the rotation and perspective of individual images and adjust the hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast if the exposure has come out differently on different images. The main drawback is that you can't zoom in on the images to see fine details, but you can get a preview in the viewer. While working on a panorama may sound a little grand for your vacation snaps, it does mean that you can save your creation as a JPEG and go back later to turn it into a screen saver. Cool 360 can also automatically make a Web page with your image. If you do make a Web page, beware, as Cool 360 doesn't reduce the image in size, it just tells the browser to show it at a smaller size, which means the download takes just as long. If you're making a 360-degree wraparound image, you can export it embedded into a viewer application, or put it on a Web page to use with the browser plug-in. Cool 360 is a simple program to use, and with good pictures to start with you can get excellent results. --Mary Branscombe