Cool photography software

I’m a huge photography hobbyist.  Like most photo-hobbyists, I like my Photoshop and Lightroom and Flickr and other photo software.  I recently watched an episode of Wired Science, and found out about something called Photosynth.

So, you might know about how panoramas are created without a panoramic camera…  Take a bunch of photos on a tripod while panning around a scene, then put them all in something that can interpret the photos as sort of meshing together to create an extra wide photo — a panoramic photo.

Photosynth is kind of like that except it doesn’t work on just 2 dimensions (height and width), meshing the edges of the photos…  it works in 3 dimensions, to create a virtual space by calculating where the camera was that captured the photo (among other magic stuff).  Imagine being in a courtyard, taking photos while turning yourself around.  Load those photos into Photosynth, the software extrapolates the edges and portions each photo has in common, and it creates the courtyard in 3d that you can virtually walk around to examine the features as if you were actually there.

VERY cool stuff, indeed.

It was created by Microsoft Live Labs, and you need to download the software in order to view the “synths” as well as create them.  There’s also a handy guide for tips on taking photos that work best.