Since I asked earlier how to rescue some panoramas that I took I think it's
only fair to report on the results.

Image #1  Since it's highly unlikely that I could re-take the pictures [it's
a long way from Maryland to the Colorado/New Mexico border area on US285, I
had to find a way to get good results merging the series of pictures I took
of a mountain lake and the gorgeous background and sky.

The primary mistake I made was in having the camera set to automatic
exposure rather than having the same exposure for each image AND in having
the polarizing filter on the lens which heightened the brightness
differences between successive frames.  Not using a tripod was, I felt, a
minor issue and it turned out to be so as well.

There were 10 images covering about a 150 degree arc spaced more-or-less
randomly but as even as I could do standing on the edge of a moderately
steep slope at the edge of a lake.

Image #2  Again, it's a long way from Baltimore to Leadville CO and when I
took the picture of the Leadville Colorado & Southern Locomotive #641 I
couldn't stand back far enough to get it all in one picture even with a 19mm
zoom on my digital SLR so I took a series of 6 images, again panning across
the area.  Since the locomotive was fairly close (probably 20' away), I
should have walked parallel to the tracks instead of panning but ... who
knew at the time?

Anyway ...
Photoshop CS2 did a fairly poor job overall.  When presented with the 10
images of the first panorama, it even got the order of them wrong!  When I
restricted it to the last three images, the alignment was very nice but
there was visible banding resulting from exposure differences.  With the
locomotive, the stitching was so bad that the track beneath it wasn't smooth
but had several jumps.

Canon's PhotoStitch did even worse.  I didn't try with the scenic but with
the locomotive the stitching was so bad that some of the locomotive's wheels
weren't round!  Worse, I felt, was that the range of focal lengths available
in the setup stopped at 24mm and I couldn't enter a specific value.

ThePanoramaFactory did a remarkable job on both.  The scenic panorama was
seamless, both in geometry and brightness.  The locomotive picture had some
distortion but I realized that the program had actually rendered what I
would have seen with a single wide angle lens which renders closer subjects
larger than distant ones, an effect even noticeable on peoples faces.

I didn't have any other programs to try but I think that the $60 for the
PanoramaFactory program was well spent.  I have no connection with the
company that produced it, I'm just a very satisfied user.

The next time I try to take a panorama of a close subject I'll try walking
past it instead of panning around,  I'll also take a single light reading
and use it for all of the images in the set.  Perhaps for really critical
subject matter with really obvious geometric designs the results wouldn't
have been this good and a better technique, possibly using a horizontally
aligned camera on a tripod would have been better but for what was intended
as a pseudo-professional scenic, the mountain lake is a roaring success and
the locomotive is a lesson in how not to take a panorama.

   Norm