Suggestion to Greatly Improve Photo Merge Panorama

I just found this forum so I’m not sure if this post is in the right place.  I hope that Adobe monitors this as I would love to see this idea go forward.

I am a former professional photographer who now just shoots for the love of doing it.  Back in my film days, I always was interested in panoramas, but back then, that would mean either very expensive equipment or advanced darkroom skills.

I started doing digital photography in 2003.  Later on, I learned about stitching software and began to start doing panoramas.  Over the years I learned some tricks and came up with some techniques to improve the quality.  For the past dozen or so years I have settled into using two applications, Photoshop’s Photo Merge, and Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE).

Note: Before DPReview went away, I learned that I am far from being the only person who uses just those two programs.

I realize that there are other Panorama apps, but they are expensive and between the two that I use, I get satisfactory results. 

I use both programs…for EVERY panorama that I stitch.  I always start with ICE and then redo the panorama in Photo Merge.  Overall, Photo Merge gives me better results, but it is a roughly 60/40 split and many times the differences are not that great.

Here’s my suggestion… Adobe should buy ICE from Microsoft and incorporate it into Photo Merge.  As Ice has not been updated or supported by Microsoft in many years, it probably would not cost too much.  The only real expense would be utilizing engineering time to ‘merge’ their software into Photoshop.

Why?

Because there are many things that ICE does significantly better than Photo Merge…

• ICE is faster than Photo Merge.
• ICE is more robust.  It can easily handle 100-200 image panorama or murals.  Photo Merge (in my experience, my PC) maxes out around 20-30 images.
• ICE allows you to quickly review the difference between Perspective, Spherical, and Cylindrical while also giving you other options that Photo Merge does not give you, like Mercator, Fisheye, and Transverse.  With Photo Merge, you choose one, and if that does not work, you have to close the pano, and start all over. 
• ICE allows you to manipulate the image by dragging up/down, left/right to remove distortion BEFORE you actually save the file.  With Photo Merge (PM), you get what you get and have to use the Camera Distortion function, later in the workflow.
• If the initial panorama is tilted, you can also correct that before saving the file with ICE.  Again, straightening out the panorama is later in the workflow with PM.
• With ICE, if one or more of the images does not line up well to get stitched, the application will ignore those images and stich up the rest.  With PM, you get a pop-up error and will have to close out that project and manually remove the bad image and start all over again.
• ICE has a better successful average.  Many times, I will get a result from ICE that PM cannot do.  I have never experienced a PM pano that ICE could not do.
• ICE does give you the option of Planar motion.  PM does not

To be fair, there are also some areas that PM does better…

• Auto Fill.  Although about 10% of the time the Auto Fill algorithm does some seriously funky choices, this feature is a major winner for panorama photography.
• PM does a better overall job of blending.
• Every ICE panorama has to be finished in Photoshop.

From my experience, from release to release there has been some tweaking of Photo Merge Panorama.  Over time, it has gotten faster and more dependable.  BUT, it is basically the same functionality as ten years ago.  Finding a way to incorporate the ICE functionality into Photo Merge would revolutionize the Panorama feature of Photoshop.

I realize that panorama photography is a very small segment of the market.  I also realize that phones and digital cameras have panorama functionality (although very poor IMO).  BUT…from a marketing POV, Panos are sexy.  When done well, people are always drawn to them.

Adobe…please look into this.