Introducing Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Microsoft Image Compositing Editor is an image compositing or stitching tool that can stitch together series of overlapping photographs to produce a high resolution panoramic image. The resulting image can then be saved as JPEG or TIFF and to a multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

Some of the added features of Microsoft Image Compositing Editor are listed below as quoted.

• A GPU accelerated orientation adjustment tool. Sometimes the automatic stitching software doesn't quite get the viewing direction correct, or perhaps you want to use a rectilinear projection instead of a cylindrical projection. This new tool allows you to interactively make these adjustments.


• 360 blending support. Our fast poisson blend technique now creates a seamless 360 blend.
  
• Output to Photoshop layers.


• Create an HD View web page.


• Create a Silverlight Deep Zoom web page, including new 360 support in our Silverlight application.


• Integration with both the Windows Shell and the next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, so that you can quickly launch a new stitching project.


• Advanced orientation adjustment view allows planar, cylindrical, and spherical projections
  
• Support for different types of camera motion


• Excellent exposure blending using Microsoft Research fast Poisson algorithm.


• Automatic cropping to maximum image area.


• No image size limitation - stitch gigapixel panoramas.


• Native support for 64-bit operating systems such as 64-bit Vista.


• Output in a wide variety of image formats.

Using Microsoft ICE , a user can also modify how the resulting image will look by making use of the orientation tool.

The image above was modified so as to look as if a shift or tilt lens was used. This was achieved using the orientation. There are many more added features included in the software and if you want to know more you must to try it. The tool can be downloaded for free here.
SOURCE: HDVIEW Blog