The Grumpy Editor's hugin experience

Yep. I discovered this tool a little over 3 years ago, and every time I come back to use it again it's got a load better. It was quite hard work to work out how to drive it originally given my (like the editor) abject lack of knowledge of stitching and image distortion and the terminology surrounding them, so when it asked if I want to enable 'enlend' or 'autopano-sift', I had no idea whether I wanted those or not, nor did I know if I wanted 'rectilinear' or 'barrel distortion' or 'mercator projection' and so on.

I was quite amazed how well it works on a not-at-all consistent (due to water movement) image: http://wookware.org/pics/mexico/img000.jpeg.html

But now you get a nice viewer thingy of the result so it is trivial to just say 'what does it look like if I ask for one of these'. And the auto-point selection is a huge boon.

The only thing I really wish it could do better is the merginging of differently-exposed blank colour areas - that generally means blue skies. Many of my efforts to date end up with nasty staircase artifacts in the sky at the joins. I guess this has a lot to do with the JPEG compression of the originals ?, but a smidgen of blurring at the joins would make it so much better (at least for the 'average user'). Here's an example of the issue:

http://wookware.org/pics/jtrocks.jpg (1.6MB jpeg)

Hugin is marvellous. Kudos to the developers. gthumb is great too. Now if someone can just make the HDR tools this easy to drive my photography requirements will be entirely met.