I have a conventional 35 mm panoramic camera and love it. I want to buy a digital camera but am holding off until there is a panoramic model. I've checked most of the major suppliers' Web sites but to no avail. Can you help?

The answer isn't in hardware but in a sweet, $100 addition to Adobe's low-priced photography software, Photoshop Elements 2.0.

Called Photomerge, this panorama-building tool seems almost magical when it kicks in. To use it, snap off a series of photos while holding an ordinary digital camera at a consistent height, turning maybe 30 degrees each time to cover more of the scene so that each shot slightly overlaps the previous one. Once you have this group of images on the computer, you click on File and Photomerge and then point the software to the photos in the order they were snapped.

The software analyzes the patterns of light and color in each shot to find the identical spot where the edge of one image takes up on the next. In seconds the whole thing gets stitched together into a panorama that can cover just about any range with geometrical precision.

James Coates writes for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Publishing newspaper. Send e-mail to jcoates@tribune.com.