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Press release edited by Applelinks senior editor Kirk Hiner

Pangea Software has announced the immediate availability of their popular PanoPreviewer plug-in for Photoshop. Version 2.0 is now Universal Binary and compatible with Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

PanoPreviewer, only available for Mac OS X, allows panoramic photographers to instantly preview their equirectangular images as VR panoramas (an "equirectangular" image is a 360 degree panorama that has been unwrapped into a 2D image; like a map of the Earth unwrapped into a poster). Normally, when editing an equirectangular image, the photographer is constantly exporting the file and then manually loading it into some external viewer. But with PanoPreviewer, the tedium of that process has been completely eliminated. Unlike many other VR panorama viewers which use either QuicktimeVR or Java to view the images, PanoPreviewer does all of its rendering using hardware accelerated OpenGL. The result is a VR panorama that is fast and smooth even when displayed full-screen.

Previous versions of PanoPreviewer were freeware, but the new 2.0 version costs $19.95. The plug-in can be downloaded and tried out for free in demo mode by visiting the Pangea Software website.