Hello Lollie - I see this question was posted quite awhile ago, but thought I'd add my 2 cents anyway! I just went through the process of looking for the "best" manual digitizing software (for me) and came to one conclusion. But before I get there, I thought I'd mention that I know nothing about photo-stitching. What I am interested in is digitizing logos.
I started out by reading John Deer's book "Digitizing Made Easy" which I found to be extremely helpful, having never digitized anything before. One piece of advice he gives that I really like is to set your zoom level to 600% and just leave it there.
So here are some of the other things I felt were important: (1) the ability to draw outlines with bezier curves (2) the ability to easily manipulate the stitch order (3) easy to learn via manual or tutorials that come with the software.
Here's a list of the software that I either own, have played with (demos), or have been given a demo of:
Brother PE Design 7 (I own this, latest version is 8), Designers Gallery MasterWorks II (30-day demo), Bernina Designer Plus V5 (shown a demo), Viking 4D Professional (shown a demo), Embird 2008 (30-day demo)
Brother PE Design 7: This was an extremely easy program to learn how to use - the tutorials in the manual (pdf, btw) pretty much taught me everything I needed to know. I like that you can draw a shape and set both its fill and its outline. Reordering the stitching order is extremely easy. You can modify the entry and exit points for each shape by hand. I would say in general, this program was very easy to learn and very easy to operate. The thing that absolutely drives me crazy about this program is the way it handles entering and editing outlines. The word I use is "sloppy". You're never quite sure where you've entered a point as they're drawn as largish squares. Sometimes you add points by mistake without knowing it. Points may overlap (because they're drawn as squares) and you can't easily differentiate between them without zooming in. Whatever algorithm is used for computing the curves between points is just not that "smooth". I also wish that you could set the zoom level to a specified amount, instead of just zooming in and zooming out. The program lacks rulers on the edges of the design window or even a measuring tool. It also doesn't have any special demarcation for the center of the window! (I believe this was fixed in version 8). So despite the fact that this program is very easy to learn, the sloppiness in entering outlines is just too much for me.
Embird 2008: I actually played with this program before purchasing PE Design 7. You certainly can't beat its price and it seems that those who use it just love it. But being a learn-it-myself kind of person, I just couldn't make heads or tails of the "tutorials" that are provided on the Embird website. Each tutorial is written about one particular topic and they're listed in alphabetical order. There is no "overview" tutorial that would describe, say, the overall process from start to finish. Even something that listed the order in which to read the tutorials would've been helpful. So despite the fact that Embird handles drawing outlines quite nicely, I just couldn't get past the idea that I'd have to read forums or buy 3rd party tutorial CDs to learn how to use the software. So I gave up on this option.
Bernina Designer Plus V5: I went to a Bernina dealer to get a demo of this software. Considering how much the software costs, I was surprised by a couple things. You cannot set the zoom level to a specified amount. It doesn't have rulers on the edges of the design window, but it does have a measuring tool. And changing the stitching order did not seem the least bit easy. The person who gave me the demo said that you actually had to search stitch-by-stitch to figure out where shapes started and ended in order to change the stitching order. Now perhaps we were missing something as I just can't believe it would be that hard, but I was carefully looking at the screen and couldn't find any button or window panel that showed the stitching sequence of shapes. So I was rather disappointed with this software despite the fact that it did handle drawing outlines quite nicely.
Viking 4D Professional: I went to a Viking dealer to get a demo of this piece of software (actually, just the digitizing portion) as it was the software of choice for two Baby Lock salespeople! (Baby Lock sells Designers Gallery software). I was also surprised by this software as it is also quite expensive and I had high hopes for it. But I was shocked to learn that it does not use Bezier curves at all to enter outlines - you select points along your curve and the software joins the points with curves. You have no opportunity to modify the curve between the points, you must rely on the software to do it for you. So you end up having to select a lot of points to define, say, one gentle curve. I was very surprised and disappointed by this. Also, you couldn't set the zoom level by hand and I honestly can't recall if it had rulers or not. Needless to say, this software does not do it for me.
Designers Gallery Masterworks II: When I first purchased PE Design 7, you could only order a trial CD of this software and I never received mine! But I recently discovered that you can now actually download this software for a 30-day fully functional trial (you can actually save designs with the trial version). Well this program has become the cat's pajama for me! It handles drawing outlines with Bezier curves quite nicely. It has one button that allows you to close a curve without trying to match end points. It has rulers. It lets you set the zoom level to 600%. It lets you change the stitch ordering quite easily. You can move the entry/exit points for each shape. In the stitch ordering window (Sequence View), you can turn on/off groups of shapes to be stitched (they're grouped by color) (i.e. they're either displayed or not), you can lock groups of shapes so they can't be modified by mistake. There's a little horizontal bar along the bottom of the window that gives you an idea of the color ordering and the relative number of stitches for each color. And for column stitching, you can manually enter the direction of the stitches instead of relying on the software to do it for you. Though this may seem like extra work, I like that level of control. And finally, I figured out how to use this software with absolutely no manual! It was that intuitive! Very impressive.
So I did a little test where I digitized a simple logo using the same JPG as a backdrop using PE Design 7 and Masterworks II. I started out by manually outlining the shapes in PE Design 7 and found it so frustrating that I actually used the auto-digitizer instead (a first for me). Using the auto-digitizer meant that I had to do a fair amount of clean-up on the JPG to get the auto-digitizer to work well. The results actually looked okay, though the curves were more bumpy than smooth. But being a fairly small logo, the stitched out design looked just fine. I then manually entered the outlines using Masterworks II, created the design, and stitched it out. It also looked just fine. So both programs produced a design with comparable results. However, I would say that overall process of digitizing the logo was just far more pleasant using Masterworks II.
So in general, I'm sure that all of these programs have their pros and cons. But for what *I* want to do, Masterworks II was by far the easiest to use. Happy Stitching!
Lynne