The iPhone App “You Gotta See This!” stitches together a montage of multiple iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4G camera images right after you shoot. Just press the start button and wave the camera over the area of interest. You can use either of the two cameras. When you’re done, the app creates a beautiful, accurately pieced together montage. It’s an amazing app.
Have you ever been on vacation and seen a beautiful panorama that’s just too wide or tall for a single iPhone shot? Or you’re standing at the top of Copper Mountain, Colorado, and you can see snow-capped peaks and blue sky for 50 miles all around? Capturing panoramas like that is now not only possible but trivial.
How it Works
“You Gotta See This!” is an app from Boinx Software, Ltd. It’s designed to take panoramic photos. All you have to do is push a button once to start the capture mode and start to move the iPhone around in front of you, a “swipe,” until you’ve covered all that you want to capture. When you’re finished, press the stop button. The app will then stitch together the many photos it automatically took into one panorama.
When the processing is done, which only takes a few seconds, you have options.
Options
The final image is also compressed so that it doesn’t take up a lot of space. In the photo below of part of my back yard, the entire photo was only 604 KB. (Yes, barely out of February and no snow, almost 60F in Denver.) While the stitching doesn’t seem to be perfect and can be subject to tilting the camera as you move it around, it’s good enough to show amazing vacation or architectural photos to your friends or colleagues.
I haven’t tried it on the night sky, and I doubt the results would be very good. I’ll try anyway. Take a look at some of the amazing sample photos on the Boinx website.
My back yard (edge effect supplied by app, not author)
Using the App
The App launches by showing your latest photo, a start button and a share button. Just press start and point. I recommend trying to keep the camera vertical and square to the target so the processor doesn’t have to stitch photos at different angles. Even so, Boinx says the built-in gyroscope helps offset that effect.
App home screen
Because the app keeps all the individual photos, until you take a new one, there are several ways you can prepare the image. It can be a single panorama photo or a series of framed or photos in a mosaic, called Themes. If you save to the Camera Roll and have, say Printopia installed on a Mac, you can print it right away.
Themes
The Magnifying glass icon on the app home screen allows you to inspect the montage in closer detail.
Recommendation
This is a fabulous app for a buck ninety-nine. It has never crashed, produces amazing photos, and is priced, if anything, far too low. It’s now one of my favorite apps, and many of the scenic shots I might have taken with the iPhone’s camera app will now be taken with “You Gotta See This!” instead.