Tommy asked about the previous posting.....

That previous six-image panorama and its alterations involved the following:-

The panorama was assembled using the demo version of 'Autostitch' which I got from here:- http://cvlab.epfl.ch/~brown/autostitch/autostitch.html  For the next part, making a mirror image of it, and flipping that upside-down, I used an older version of Arcsoft's 'PhotoStudio' from:- http://www.arcsoft.com/  Their latest is version 6.0, which I also have, but I'm still using version 5.5 because I like its features better. I use it for most of my photo editing, enhancing, cropping, resizing, etc., and it works very well.

The next part, adding the water reflections and waves, was done with the program 'Paint.NET' from:- http://www.getpaint.net/download.html  and the Water Reflection is a plug-in which you need to add to its Plug-ins folder. There's a lot of those plug-ins, and you should have a look at those:- http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/15260-plugin-index/  These plug-ins are an extensive list, and this is a very adaptable program, so take some time to look those over. The one I used for the waves effect is called "Water Reflection", and it is adjustable in several ways with its little settings window, to let you adjust how much of the picture is covered by its water effects, how the waves, if used, are spaced (direction, wind, etc.) and so on. http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/2482-water-reflection-ymd100725/

Another photo stitching program that works well but not automatically is Canon's PhotoStitch, which is bundled with their camera software packages, or is available on their website, if you select your camera model and Windows operating system. The Canon program does a better job of vertical stitching than the 'Autostitch', which tends to distort the width of vertical stitches. The Canon PhotoStitch doesn't distort anything, but you do of course have to input the images and then drag them into position yourself to create the end results. Canon's program however will automatically crop the ragged-edged stitching, whereas the 'Autostitch' one doesn't - for it you need to use another editor program, like Arcsoft's 'PhotoStudio' for the cropping.

With the exception of the Arcsoft 'PhotoStudio' program, all these are freebies, and Arcsoft often has special sales or reduced prices for previous customers, so check into that as well. While I'm on the topic of graphics programs, I should mention a couple of others that I like. One I use all the time as my default image-handling program is Irfan Skiljan's 'Irfanview' and you can find that here:-http://www.irfanview.com/
This program is free, but Irfan appreciates a donation for his excellent work, and this program handles a really wide variety of graphics, and does a lot of things with them, like batch edits, batch resizing, renaming, etc., and it comes with the basic plug-ins. If you want others, there's a separate plug-ins pack for it on the same site. I like it, because among other things, it offers the opportunity to zoom in or out with its displayed images, and there's a massive "Help" section if you need assistance - or Irfan even answers email if he isn't too busy. It's been updated for Windows 7 compatibility, and it works fine.

Finally, here's another freebie that makes icons from images, or modifies existing ones if you want to do that:- http://icofx.ro/  I've used this a lot, to make most of the icons on my desktop and a large collection of others as well. It's a lot of fun, and it works with the latest features of transparency and so on, so that you can remove backgrounds around the object you want before it becomes an icon. Check this one out while you're collecting graphics programs. And enjoy these!

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