Some panorama tips and a correction

Some panorama tips and a correction

Posted Sep 9, 2009 12:44 UTC (Wed) by anton (guest, #25547)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's hugin experience

I have used hugin 0.7 for a while with the autopano-sift stuff. In some cases it had troubles finding correct control points (e.g., in the sky with moving clouds or on water). In these cases I often had success by just removing the wrong control points and letting it work again.

I usually use exposure bracketing for my photographs. A cool feature of hugin is that I can throw all the different exposures of the component pictures into it and it will produce a nice panorama; I can choose the exposure right at the end.

Hugin can also be used to produce high dynamic range pictures from different exposures of the same szene, but I am still missing a good program that then compresses the high dynamic range again into a good-looking normal-dynamic-range image (often called tone mapping) for display.

Despite the coolness of hugin, I currently use Microsoft ICE for doing panoramas, and it's the only non-game program I run on Windows; it's significantly faster than hugin and has an even higher rate of success without manual intervention. But I miss being able to control the exposure of the result, and it's proprietary.

The problem with just gluing two images together is simple to understand: lenses distort.

Nitpick: The ideal lens projects a rectangle onto a rectangle (rectilinear projection), and then one usually does not say that it distorts. However, the rectangles of the images you want to glue together have a different orientation, so they need to be transformed in order to match even if the lens is ideal.

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