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.
v2014.0 [Mar 13, 2014]
Changes
- inherit many of the libpano improvements (of version 2.9.19)
- the translation plane variables Tpy and Tpp have been added to the GUI (better support for translation parameters, e.g. for nadir images. A pano with translation parameters can now be rotated)
- improvement of the GPU remapping code (bug fixes in the glue code, added some missing GPU transformations. Now fisheye lenses are supported by GPU code as well)
- better support for line control point in Control points tab (it still requires that the same image is displayed left and right for full features, but also better support for line control points above several images)
- obsolete programs matchpoint, nona_gui and PTBatcher have been removed
- outdated translations have been removed from the default install
- initialize the colour balance values during loading with EXIF values (this information is only stored and decoded by some cameras (mainly models by Panasonic, Pentax, Olympus, Nikon))
- improved the assistant
- allow customization of exiftool command used to copy metadata to output images
Added command line tools for CLI processing:
- pto_mask: manipulate mask in project file
- pto_template: apply template to project file
- pto_move: move or copy project files with all associated images
Other Improvements
- Many more improvements and bug fixes.
Languages
- Most of the translations have been updated for this release.
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