Are You Making These Mistakes With Your Photography?

[Colin Southern]

It tends to produce Colin style HDR

What on earth is "Colin style" HDR?

[inkista]

You have a point about Hugin. I have tried the focus stacking function, couldn't make it work, thought it was my shortcoming. It probably was, but if someone could give me a hint of how it actually works I would be grateful.

It's simply a different usage of enfuse than the default. By default, enfuse is used for exposure fusing, but you can also use it for focus stacking. However, in the Hugin interface, the only way you have to control enfuse is to use that little dialog box I posted an image of above to enter command line options for enfuse. The command line options are explained here. But essentially, you just have to type in: --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask into that dialog, and you should get focus stacking. Hugin will take care of aligning the images in the stack for you by invoking align_image_stack.

You could, of course, also use EnfuseGui (which I linked to up in my post) instead of having to do all the typing in of options, but the issues with that is that, iirc, EnfuseGui only does the enfuse bit--it doesn't do the aligning the stack bit, which of course, Hugin is really good at. So you'll have to call image_align_stack from the command line, first. Hugin is a GUI front end to dozens of these command line utilities, so if you installed Hugin, you should have them all installed on your box.

As far I know, PTGUI uses the same algorythm as Hugin, ...

Weeeelllll... yes. And no.

It's mostly been a complicated history. It all started with Helmut Dersch. He's the guy. The one who wrote the original PanoramaTools suite of command line tools to do all this crazy panostitching stuff. And he was a command line geek. But authoring the scripts required to do the panostitching with these tools was a pretty time-intensive and non-intuitive task, even for seasoned coders, so a number of folks took it upon themselves to write a GUI front-end using that suite of tools as the backend stitching engine. Max Lyons was probably one of the first with his PTAssembler package. There were also PTMac, PTGui, PTLens (which doesn't stitch, but used the lens correction bits in the tools), and Hugin, among others.

Part of the PT suite of tools was open source. But not all of it. So some of these guys started writing their own routines and tools. Hugin, being open source, decided to replace all of the non-open elements with fully open bits, so sometimes their backend stuff is a little different from the other packages. And nearly all of the PT-based GUIs let you pick and choose some of those back-end engines; both Hugin and PTGui will let you select nona (Hugin's default) or PTStitcher as your main stitching program. PTStitcher in particular is the problematic one, since the source code was never published, which is why nona came to be written, iirc. I might not. It's been a while. PTGui's default is their own proprietary stitching engine.

So, whether or not PTGui and Hugin are using the same algorithms to do stuff is sometimes task and options dependent, and at other times they simply are using different code. But everything was rooted in the original Panorama Tools suite.

... but I can believe it is more userfriendly, and probably has some more functions. I was thinking of getting it once or twice, but then decided to spend my money elsewhere as Hugin does the occasional panorama very well for me, way better than PS at any rate.

Yes. PTGui is only for the pano-mad who stitch panos together as a regular quite-often thing. For only occasional usage, I think Hugin is perfectly fine. I just got to where I knew that PTGui would save me hours, and those hours became worth the purchase price.

Hugin is geek when it comes to which particular projection is to be generated. It does more of them than you could shake a stick at which can be confusing.

I don't think they do enough, but I'm insane, and I've hung for a short time with the Mathmap crowd on Flickr. [grin], and I own a copy of Flexify, which makes the handful or so of Hugin's projections look a little sparse. Except it's missing the Drostify Mathmap thang.

....I would bet a pound to a penny that PTGui has ripped off code from open source packages - that's why it's so cheap.

I think you'd lose that bet. Given that PTGui development outdates Hugin's by a good 6 or 7 years, I don't buy it. To me, the feature "stealing" sometimes goes the other way 'round. PTGui had masking (and HDR) back when Hugin couldn't even run a stitch properly and crashed all the time. Just saying. And it's not like everyone wasn't "ripping off" (if you want to call it that) Dersch's Panorama Tools suite to begin with. You'll also see the feature request for viewpoint correction in Hugin over and over again.

Focus stacking uses a Hugin routine to generate a stack of aligned images. Enfuse is then used to merge them.

It's not a Hugin routine. It's YA command-line open source tool, image_align_stack. LR/Enfuse also uses image_align_stack (and Lightroom stacks), and enfuse.

I use macrofusion but haven't tried it for focus stacking only hdr. That is here. None Windows or Mac

Probably a GUI frontend to image_align_stack and enfuse. Wonder if align_image_stack can now deal with focus breathing issues on macros...

[lukaswerth]

Kathy,

thank you very much for your extensive elucidations. I know and have used Enfusegui (after having had the images aligned in PS), but frankly, I have never been satisfied with the results. There is a program by Max Lyons which also does panoramas, called PTAssembler which does, I think, a much better job, but for some reason I never paid those 35$ to get the ful working version (although I might, if I should once have some serious work to do in that direction).
With regard to the command line options, once again, thank you, I might try them out, but frankly and generally, this really is a nuisance: I am not literate with regard to those, get confused over in which boxes to fill them, and I really don't want to bother. This is clearly not what photography is about for me.
I have been using computers in some ways since the middle of the 80ties, and my observation is while this technology realy changed all our options in so many ways, there is also no other field in my life in which I have learned so much which I could use only for a very limited time, and which went completely obsolete after just a few years: PTM, MSdos with auto exec.bat and config.sys, LaTex, for heaven's sake, what completely uninteresting rubbish and waste of time that was! How many hours I spend to get a f... program to work!
In these days I want programs with a user interface.

Still, Hugin is great for panoramas...

Lukas

[inkista]

... With regard to the command line options, once again, thank you, I might try them out, but frankly and generally, this really is a nuisance: I am not literate with regard to those, get confused over in which boxes to fill them, and I really don't want to bother. This is clearly not what photography is about for me.
I have been using computers in some ways since the middle of the 80ties, and my observation is while this technology realy changed all our options in so many ways, there is also no other field in my life in which I have learned so much which I could use only for a very limited time, and which went completely obsolete after just a few years: PTM, MSdos with auto exec.bat and config.sys, LaTex, for heaven's sake, what completely uninteresting rubbish and waste of time that was! How many hours I spend to get a f... program to work!
In these days I want programs with a user interface. ...

Oddly enough, my current job involves generating documentation using LaTeX. And we use batch files galore. But, of course, back in the '80s, I learned troff and nroff instead. [headdesk]. I need the brainspace that's holding onto man page macros back for something else.

I do know what you mean, about how quickly computer technology moves, but I started out somewhat more luckily by "growing up" with UNIX (BSD-flavor) and C code vs., say, DOS and BASIC/Fortran. And while C is old school these days, it's given me the basis where I can read Java or Python code relatively easily, and while Linux and open source often feels full of the funk to me (being a BSD-head that prefers csh to bash), I can still make out what's going on. For some of us command line options ARE an easier way to get some things done. The chmod octal bitmask permissions option (chmod -777, etc.) is still pretty dang awesome as shortcuts go: you get to set nine separate file permissions with one 3-digit number.

[ajohnw]

What on earth is "Colin style" HDR?

They tend to lack the "fashionable" colour aspects. That might disappoint some. Basically they often look dead natural which is probably why Enfuse can focus stack too.

John
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[ajohnw]

I'm not so sure about some of that Kathy. Hugin has been around for some time one way or the other and when I searched panorama etc some years ago now I would be sure to remember yet another damm windoze program. I reckon I have been using Linux for over 15 years now. I agree about bash. I just don't like that type of naming convention. Must admit I have done similar having to use MsDos at work with KED getting the assembler out when stupid dos wouldn't do what I wanted to do. Trouble is bash has grown like topsy. These days though there really isn't much cause to use it.

One fact about stealing is that lots really have a basis in Unix. Good place to look and save a lot of work. Students write all sorts of things. The main problem is getting hold of it.

I'm well aware that OS uses bits and pieces from all over the place. That's what gives Gates the wobbles. It's so flexible. Not that he need worry really. The C++ maniacs are wrecking the desktops slowly but surely doing work that they mostly really aren't suited to. You should google Nepomuk to see what I mean. I'd expect to see a lot of complaints. A desktop search and indexing routine. I went to great lengths to avoid having it on my machine. Now it seems even the digital clock needs it. It's too easy for people to pull in other services. However I just looked again and hurray it's now disabled again so my spell checker doesn't leave a word underlined for up to 5 secs any more.

I started using computers in around 1969. As things to design slowly disappeared in the UK all that was left was "computers" and electronics so my last 20 years were spent doing mostly that. Basic -Dartmouth, Fortan,Cobol,Dibol,C - old hack style, and many assemblers. Passing interests in Forth,Lisp and Pascal. Even a bit of APL a long time ago. Curious thing about software. I have found that if some one manages to stop writing the stuff for long enough they may never ever start again. I do get tempted every now and again though.

I was going to try a 10 shot stack on some dwarf iris in out garden. Decided I needed a macro slide and just after it arrived we had cold snap which killed the flowers off. Something else will crop up so just have to wait and then see what sort of job enfuse makes of it. There are several others. I just feel it would be best for the Hugin devs to finish and tidy this area up. Their HDR on my machine seems to have gone! Actually my recollection is that something was not working as it should but I may well have not selected the correct perspective.

One nice thing about OS is that it's sometimes possible to influence the devs. I've complained about 3 things over the past year or so and all have been worked on. One result was please use a package from another source but the person who picked it up did spend time looking at it. Another was something that had been crippled because people kept asking if it was secure - it's now easy to use again. I had to modify source. Not sure what's happened about the other but some one is working on it. It's a difficult one. Apple seem to have changed a protocol at their end and they shouldn't have. The code that looks after making this work does one or two things it really hadn't aught to do. I'm happy because it will get fixed eventually. I'm currently thinking about an email to the person that maintains my favourite PP package. I know he will be interested and may even do the work. Try that with MS. I did get a response once after trying to email Gates direct. They may have even made the changes. The most stupid news group download sorting routine I have ever come across.

John
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[inkista]

John, you might not remember PTGui, but I'm someone who regularly stitches 360x180 spherical panos. There were only a handful of tools that could do it at the time, so I knew of every one of them when they hit the scene. Hugin was the latecomer. If you don't believe me, go read the revision histories:

Hugin
PTGui
PTAssembler

Hugin was stable in 2005. PTGui and PTAssembler were stable in 2001. And all three revision histories mention Panorama Tools copiously throughout.

[ajohnw]

I'm pretty sure that there was something about but not much luck finding it other than these web pages

http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/

http://panotools.sourceforge.net/

One thing for sure. Like many things it seems it started from free and open software. Many things do. Must admit I have a bit of a thing about this. Take Linux for instance. In one form or another it's used all over the place. Companies take it add a little bit of code and then sell it. I feel that they should contribute to some sort of foundation where the money could be used for defending OS's rights. It would help individuals who spend a lot of time and effort on code and then find some one is selling it.

John
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[inkista]

I'm pretty sure that there was something about but not much luck finding it other than these web pages

http://webuser.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/

http://panotools.sourceforge.net/

Yes. As I said. Everybody's starting with PanoramaTools as the base. But the entire PT suite was NOT open source. Dersch held onto some of the source code and never published it. And, regardless, Hugin and PanoramaTools are different beasts.

One thing for sure. Like many things it seems it started from free and open software. Many things do. Must admit I have a bit of a thing about this. Take Linux for instance. In one form or another it's used all over the place. Companies take it add a little bit of code and then sell it. I feel that they should contribute to some sort of foundation where the money could be used for defending OS's rights. It would help individuals who spend a lot of time and effort on code and then find some one is selling it.

OTOH, as someone who works with open source in the corporate culture, I can assure you that while they may not donate money, they do donate code, code fixes, and documentation to the open source efforts which can be more valuable. And yes, let's take Linux as an example. Today, 80% of the Linux kernel code contributions these days comes from corporations. (BTW, you'll also want to note how Ubuntu rates in the list of contributions). And this has actually long been the case. Back in 2010 it was 75%. It's a two-way relationship, not a one-way one.

You have a thing about corporate "stealing of open source"--I have a thing about Linux proponents with a chip on their shoulder who feel personal superiority simply in the fact that they use open source. Anyone who uses open source but doesn't contribute back to the codebase or development effort in some way, to me, are still freeloaders. Open source is about a cooperative effort--about the power of crowdsourcing and people donating time and energy for everyone's benefit. But simply using the code is a far cry from helping to advance and fix it. Most open source projects tend to boil down to only a handful of developers doing the bulk of the work in their spare time for the love of the thing. Users are feature-greedy and demand this or that or the other, but have no concept of what's involved in building it, and to me, the only way you can really pay back an open source effort is to donate time and energy and pitching in on the actual work and building the feature you want (which is what corporations do). Money is the cheap way out.

Now, I'm happily a freeloader of open source like most (I couldn't survive what I have to do at work without Eclipse), but to me that's not a mark of pride or moral superiority.