[KimDaBa] Hugin rocks... after you figure out its quirks/bugs

[Shawn Willden]

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On Friday 12 November 2004 10:53 pm, jedd wrote:
>  Added that in, but apt's confused (tries to get files from .../debs/debs/)
>  so downloaded them manually.

Interesting.  Worked for me.  I think the archive may have been reorganized a 
bit since I first found and used it, though, because I notice apt giving me 
some errors now.

>  That's when I discovered there's no 
>  uninstall paragraph in the hugin source (cvs or snapshot) tree.

I noticed that too.  Luckily, I'd installed my handbuilt copies with 
checkinstall, so I could just dpkg -r them.

>  But at least this version runs long enough to let me load a project and
>  save it and then quit the application.   Which is an improvement on the
>  average run-time of a self-compiled hugin.  It doesn't seem to ship with
>  nona, though, which is a bother since nona's one of the casualties of my
>  manual make-uninstall process.

Hmmm.  Nona's working for me.  Probably because I built it by hand at some 
point.  Nope, I just checked.  According to dpgk -S, nona is included in the 
hugin package.

>  How many shots did you take of the Darling Harbour one, say, and did
>  you do any preprocessing before banging them thru hugin?

Darling Harbor was six images.  The largest one I've done was ~20 images.

I don't generally do any preprocessing before stitching.  I have had a few 
situations where the images were all exposed very differently from one 
another and I tried to fix them up before stitching them together, with mixed 
results.  To avoid that problem I've learned to take my panorama shots in 
manual mode.  It requires a little fiddling to get the right f-stop and 
shutter speed worked out, but it makes sure that all of the pictures blend 
well.

Another good technique to avoid large color and brightness changes at the 
seams is to use nona to produce multiple tiffs and then use enblend to 
combine them.  Enblend does a very nice job.  My only complaint is the 
current version of enblend can't produce layered output.  I'd really like to 
have that, so I can then go adjust the blending manually with the GIMP.

>  What's your 
>  approach with panoramas with people (you don't know / can't control)
>  in them?

Clean them up later, mostly.  If there are lots of people around, I try to 
take the shots with a lot more overlap, ideally so that any region of the 
final image is present in three or even four of the source images.  That 
gives me lots of options to choose from when assembling the final image.  
Then I put all of the images in hugin, hook 'em up and then have it generate 
a layered PSD (with PTStitcher; Nona doesn't have that option).  Then I load 
the PSD up in the GIMP, add layer masks to the layers and start selectively 
painting in transparency, trying to construct a single, coherent scene 
without any duplicated people or missing body parts.  OTOH, duplicating 
people can be fun, too.  My first ever panorama involved getting my son Ethan 
in every shot, and the one of the falling diver is quite nice, I think (well, 
the source images weren't great, but the effect is cool).

The Hanauma Bay photo was interesting that way, not because of people but 
because of the waves.  I took the left-side pictures between waves and the 
right-side pictures during the breaking of a largish wave, with lots of foam 
spreading over the reef.  I tried lots of things but ultimately just blended 
it so the shift from no-foam to foam is gradual enough that it doesn't stand 
out.

Fun stuff!

 Shawn.
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