Anyone using Hugin for panos?

[NorthernFocus]

Trying to decide on a stitching program that will handle 16bit files. Based on what I'm reading, Hugin sounds like it will do what I need and the price is right. Any comments on personal experience would be appreciated.

[inkista]

I don't use Hugin because I have PTGui. But if the pricetag attracts you, and you can suss out the interface, then Hugin is the next best thing. I stitch 360x180s, and most of the packages others rely on (ICE, PS's Photomerge) just won't cut it when you're doing full spherical view panos. Hugin can. The reasons I ended up shelling out the bucks for PTGui were a much better masking tool (saves me hours of Photoshop dinking), viewpoint optimization (priceless for nadir patching), and the ability to output layered .psd files. Hugin's masking feature is more annoying to use, and so far, Hugin doesn't have viewpoint optimization (although I bet they're working on it), and as open source they don't do licensed file formats any more.

The thing to keep in mind with Hugin is that because it's an open source package, it's constantly evolving at a relatively rapid pace. The last major release had a pretty big change in how the UI is presented, so older tutorials are gonna be a little sticky to get through. And some settings in the interface are going to be abstruse or cryptic, and may require a little extra study to understand. Hugin has become a very handy front end for any number of command-line utilities for graphics processing, so things like entering command-line options into text boxes is part of the way Hugin can work, depending on the task you want to accomplish.

For example, you can use the enfuse open source command line tool via Hugin to do exposure fusing. The default settings for this will work pretty well, and you won't have to dig any further into the interface. But if you want to use enfuse to focus stack instead of exposure fuse, then you'll have to change the three main selection criteria. What enfuse does is it selects individual pixels from member images in a stack to create a final image. The selection is done on three criteria: exposure, contrast, and saturation. Think of it as masking at a pixel-level. Weighting more heavily for exposure/saturation gets you exposure fusing. Weighting more heavily for contrast (i.e., focus) gets you focus stacking. But to change the weighting to be all contrast, and none towards exposure or saturation means knowing how to read a man page, and then typing --wExposure=0 --wSaturation=0 --wContrast=1 into the text box for enfuse options in Hugin.

Which is why I use the Lr/Enfuse plugin and mess about with sliders instead if all I want to do is run enfuse.

If you are a UNIX/Linux command line geek, though, Hugin isn't nearly as unnatural as it would feel to someone coming from, say, ICE, and just wanting a completely automated stitcher. BTW, I just googled, and it looks like ICE supports 16-bit.

[Polar01]

I use Photoshop to create panos, last one was 6 across by 2 down total 12 raw files from a D600, first when into ACR to adjust the raw images then stitched in Photoshop, saved as a tiff, then reopened in ACR to polish some more then into Photoshop some curves adjustments then saved as a psd file.

Cheers: Allan

[IzzieK]

Although I have Hugin, I just couldn't get my head around it so I bought PTGui and have been using that instead...sorry I am not of any help to you...

[NorthernFocus]

Thanks for the replies. Sounds like the UI is the potential issue. But it's free so I'll probably at least give it a try.

[lukaswerth]

For what it's worth, I use Hugin, and so far I have done every Pano worth doing (for me) with it. It is an excellent and powerful program, not at all difficult - unless you try focus stacking; there was just a discussion on this in another thread, you need the command line for this.

Lukas

[NorthernFocus]

Thanks, Lukas. I downloaded it this morning and gave it a quick test drive merging three jpegs. The pano function seems straightforward enough. When I get the time I'll give it a go with 16bit files which is the whole point of my interest.

[lukaswerth]

16bit files should work. I always safe the result as a tiff-file.

Lukas

[inkista]

For what it's worth, I use Hugin, and so far I have done every Pano worth doing (for me) with it. It is an excellent and powerful program, not at all difficult - unless you try focus stacking; ...

I'd rephrase that as Hugin's not at all difficult until you try and go off the default stitching path to do something more complex or off-label. There have been many times I've fed my fisheye 360x180 images into Hugin and gotten nonsense and then had to manually position images and define control points to fix things, while feeding the same images into PTGui haven't required any manual fixes at all. But. Shooting 360x180 panos with a fisheye lens isn't most shooters' typical panostitching scenario. Certain tasks, like fixing/adjusting for parallax error in the original image sets or nadir patching can quickly become a sticky patch of confusion with any pano stitcher, and that's where all those extra tools that are hidden by the interface modes come in. You may never need them. But if you do, it's nice to have them there--it just may take a bit of time to learn how to use them.

One more note: the GL preview window, and particularly the Move/Drag tab is one of your most powerful tools. It's very very simple to fix a curved horizon by simply dragging vertically in that window. You can also reposition what's in the center of a 360º pano by dragging horizontally. And fixing a tilted or S-horizon (with a 360x180) by right-dragging. You don't have to just take what the stitcher gives you by default or mess about with distortion/skew tools in PS to do these fixes.