The start of August has brought along with it an update to the Deep Zoom Composer. According to Microsoft, the new version of the Deep Zoom Composer serves to resolve stability issues, to kick quality up a notch by delivering bug fixes and enhanced performance. Additionally, the new iteration of the solution delivers extra features unavailable in previous releases such as Panoramic Stitching and PhotoZoom Upload. The Deep Zoom Composer works in conjunction with the Deep Zoom technology featured in Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

Panoramic Stitching, a technology developed by Microsoft Research and included into Windows Live Photo Gallery, has now made it all the way into the Deep Zoom Composer. All that end users have to do is select a series of images that feature similar characteristics and create a panoramic photo. The stitching process is entirely automatic, users having a say only in the segment of the final image which they will want to save as the panoramic photo.

"Microsoft Live Labs PhotoZoom is designed to let users show off their photos with Deep Zoom and Silverlight by allowing users to upload their Deep Zoom collections to the web. To upload my collection, all I needed to do was login using my Windows Live ID in Deep Zoom Composer under "PhotoZoom Export". Before you are able to upload a collection, you must first go to the Microsoft Live Labs PhotoZoom website and login to create an account associated with your Windows Live ID," revealed Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc.

The updated Deep Zoom Composer will permit end users to set up new albums on the Microsoft Live Labs Incubation Platform website and upload their content while controlling the quality of the images. Via PhotoZoom, users are able to leverage the Embed option for the uploaded collections stored on the website.

"Our PhotoZoom Upload functionality inside Deep Zoom Composer is causing some uploads to not fully finish before timing out, and we hope to have a fix for this really soon. (...) If you are receiving a 401 error when attempting to upload to PhotoZoom, please try again in a short while. There may be some temporary glitches as we deal with some issues related to this," explained a member of the DZC Team.

Deep Zoom Composer Beta is available for download here.