Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most versatile and sophisticated image editors. There are several versions and flavours available:

• For the amateur often bundled with a digital camera or a scanner named 'photoshop LE' (older) or 'photoshop Elements' (recent).
• For the professional (or who ever wants to pay the higher price) more featured and simply named 'photoshop', 'photoshop CS' or 'photoshop CS2'

Photoshop CS and CS2 are currently the only versions that allows layered full 16 bit workflow (alternatives see below). For any other panorama work photoshop is recommended although not strictly necessary since f.e. Panorama Tools Plugins work with many different image editors as long as they are compatible to use photoshop plugins (like f.e. IrfanView).

Some (randomly chosen) features of current pro version (photoshop CS):

• Full color management.
• 16 bit layers
• large image support up to 300,000 x 300,000 pixels
• action recorder for simple automated tasks
• three different script languages for complex scripting: Javascript, VBScript (Windows only), Applescript (Mac only).

More information on http://www.adobe.com

Alternatives to photoshop

The Gimp is a free image editor, however it doesn't yet support 16 bit colordepth.

Cinepaint is a version of the gimp that supports full 16 bit workflow.

Paint Shop Pro is a popular Windows shareware application that supports photoshop plugins such as the Panorama Tools Plugins