Panoramas have been used in photography for a long time to give viewers an immersive perspective of a landscape or room. Some years ago, creating a panorama required a special type of camera. However, the development of modern software applications has made it possible to create your own panoramas out of a sequence of photos, even when they weren’t taken in the ideal technical conditions.
Hugin is one of those applications that allow creating panoramic images. The enormous list of features available and the technical knowledge required to create good panoramas make this tool difficult to use despite the efforts of the developers. However, the designers have tried to compensate this with three different interface modes: simple, advanced and expert. Moreover, there’s an extensive help file that accompanies the application.
In simple mode, there is a tab labeled Assistant that facilitates creating a panorama. You just need to follow the three basic steps of loading the source images, aligning them and creating the panorama. However, you should be aware that this produces only decent results. Therefore, if you want to go beyond that, you should move on to one of the other two modes.
The application is compatible with various picture formats, such as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HDR, and EXR. Likewise, it allows processing projects in batches, which can save a lot of time. From the technical point of view, it’s quite complete as it supports various types of projections and lens. Unfortunately, the tool stopped working when I chose the stereographic lens type.
All in all, Hugin has many more features than other similar applications. Consequently, the results are also considerably better. However, it has the inconvenience of being more difficult to use. So, if you accept the challenge of learning to use it, you will be very pleased with the results. Luckily, as this is an open-source tool, you’ll have nothing to lose.
v2016.2 [Sep 30, 2016]
Allow reading of image positions from Papywizard XML files: First add the image to a new project and then select File, Import settings from Papywizard XML file... This will read the lens settings, the image positions and also, if applicable, the bracket settings. After this, the usual workflow is to run cpfind with --prealigned switch and then geocpset to connect orphanded images.
The internal blender and verdandi got the possibility to blend seams as alternative to current hard seam: For each seam the color of second image is adapted to the match the color of the first seam. For this blender, the blender order changes according to the overlap. The blending starts with the exposure anchor and blends then all overlapping images. This blending mode is not suited if there are bigger misalignments or bigger parallax errors.
The display of the control point error (after optimizing and in fast preview window) and the control point list window can now limited to take only control points in active images into account (menu Edit, Optimize only active images, connected with the setting on the optimizer tab).
Improvements to mask tab in Hugin (edit crop of all images of the same lens at once) and find panorama dialog in PTBatcherGUI (remove images from found panoramas, split found panorama into two).
Several improvements for Mac OS.
Fixes several issues with fast preview window which could result in random crashes (uninitialized variables, memory leaks).
Design, edit, and print your own CD, DVD, and Blu-ray disc and case labels
