Image Composite Editor is a small, free program for creating panoramas from multiple photos or film shots, developed by Microsoft Research. ICE combines simplicity with rich possibilities. It can be successfully used by amateurs, who only need automatic mode, as well as professionals, who feel confident in choosing the parameters of the panorama manually.

Creating a panorama requires four steps: importing the source material, stapling, cropping and exporting. In the first step, as the name indicates, you must upload all the photos or videos to the program.

Before proceeding to the second step, you must select the panorama parameters. Here you can rely on the machine and let it detect the image layout and camera movement by itself, or arrange them manually. After stitching, i.e.

automatically combining several photos or film shots into one large image, we can choose the projection and adjust the layout so that the horizon is horizontal and the perspective is correct... or not - everything depends on the fantasy of the creator. The next step is to select an interesting frame from the panorama.

At this stage, we can also use automatic completion if, after adjusting the projection, it turns out that the image does not cover the full target area. The machine can cope well with small areas and a uniform background (clear sky, lawn). More advanced operations, such as tree magnification, can give surprising results.

The operation can be cancelled at any time if it turns out that the programme is not able to cope with the achievements of the missing space. Usually, however, the quality is satisfactory and even an experienced eye will not find anything suspicious in the image. Finally, all you need to do is to export the image in the selected format and size.

As we staple several large images, panoramas are often far too large for most applications. Here you can immediately send a panorama of Photosynth or create an interactive image (for example using Silverlight), which can be zoomed in as much as you like and which is suitable for publication on the website. ICE requires C+++ libraries to work, which can be downloaded from Microsoft's website.