Panoramic images with Hugin

From Wikipedia:

hugin is a cross-platform open source panorama photo stitching program developed by Pablo d'Angelo and others. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal's Enblend and Enfuse.

Unlike autostitch, hugin is a complex program with hundreds of options. In this quick tutorial I'll try to teach you only the basics of panorama-making with hugin.

So, let's start... When you run hugin for the first time you will see something like this:

There are many different ways to stitch a panorama in hugin. I'll continue with the easiest (at least for me) path: simple manual stitching.

Click the "Images" tab:

Select the "Add time series of images" button. Then select the images you made for your panorama:

Click on the "Camera and lens" tab and check if the settings for your camera/lenses are correct. It should be, if the EXIF data embeded with your digital photos are OK.

Click on the "Control points" tab:

Now you must find control points between neighbor images. At the top there is a list of all your images. We will start with the first and second. Select the "2" button on the right part of the screen, and the second image should be shown:

Now find the controll points (ie. same positions) on both images. First click on the left side, then on the same point in the second photo. The more controll points you find - the better your result will be. For this example, I tried to find three points:

After you've done for the first and second image click on the right arrow (top-right of the window) for the second and third images pair. And so on...

Note that, after you found your first control point, hugin sometimes try to guess the best point. Just double-click on your left image - and it will try to find the same position on the other side.

After you have finished with all your images - go to the "Optimiser" tab:

Click on "Optimise now". If everything went OK - you should see this dialog/message:

Click "Yes", of course ;)

Click on the "Preview" button in the toolbar (third from the right).

This is not the actual result, but just a quick view on how your pano will be after the stitching process. As you see, the pano is not straight. Click on the "Straighten" button in the toolbar:

...close the preview window, and then go to the "Stitcher" tab, the last one:

You can experiment with the options here, but most of the times - the default options should be OK. Click the "Stitch now!" button, and select the resulting file.

Open that file in a photo-editing application of you choice (here's GIMP)...

Crop the top and bottom part of the pano:

The last step is, of course... Upload and share your panoramic images on panoye! :)

Panoramas with Autopano Pro

I had an opportunity to test this really nice panorama stitching software called AutoPano Pro. AutoPano Pro is one of three panoramic applications based on Autostitch (the other two being Serif PanoramaPlus, and Calico).
 
AutoPano Pro is available for Windows, Mac and Linux for 99 € (around 145 USD).

Like Autostitch, AutoPano detects and stitches automatically your panoramas, without the need to find hotspots manually. But, also, it has many more options than autostitch.

OK, let us start with the tutorial...

AutoPano, not only stithes your photos automatically, but it can also find multiple panoramas from photos in the same directory. For the tutorial I put photos from two different panoramas in the directory ~/Desktop/panoramas/

When you start AutoPano pro you will see something like the image bellow. If not, select the "Split 50%" icon in the toolbar (the 6th icon).

Click the Browse folder icon, and select the directory with your images:

AutoPano will load your images:

Click on green Detect/Stop all icon above your images:

The proccess of searching for panoramas in your directory will last a few moments (depending on how many panoramas are there and how many photos in each panorama)...

When ready, look at the right column. There you have thumbnails of your panoramas:

Select the panorama you want to make, and then click the blue Render all panoramas icon:

The two most important options are image width/height and the output panorama directory and filename. There are many more options available, but since this is only a very basic tutorial, I will not cover them all here.

Just click "Render" and the stitching proccess will start:

The cool part is that you can actually see what the program is doing. You can also pause/resume and/or the priority of this thread.

After all, I think AutoPano pro is a very good stitching software. Well worth your 99€ ( :).

Of course, if it is too much for you, you can always use or Autostitch (free/shareware) or hugin (opensource).
 

Tutorial: Panoramic photos with autostitch

Developed by Matthew Brown and David G. Lowe, autostitch is a software tool for creating panoramas. It is proprietary, but free to download and use. The only restriction is that you must acknowledge that you used autostitch for your panoramic photos.

In this article, I will try to explain how to use autostitch to create 360-degree panoramic images.

First of all, you must take your photos. I found that it is easier to stitch when the photos were taken in portrait (i.e. vertical) mode. Here you can see the images I used for this panorama:

Note that the photos cover more than 360-degrees. The photo IMG_2821.JPG is almost the same as IMG_2823.JPG. That is why my first photo will be IMG_2821.JPG, and the last one IMG_2837.JPG (because they partly overlaps).

Neighbor photos must overlap. And the bigger the overlapping area -- the easier will be to stitch them together:

When you download and unzip autostich, you just have to start autostitch.exe. Autostitch works fine even on linux (I tried it on Ubuntu 6.10 with wine).

This is how it looks like:

Next thing is to tell autostitch about the width of your panorama. Select Edit->Options and select your desired with in the in the field Width (pixels). Default value is 1400px. I usually choose 5000 or 6000 pixels:

Click OK, and then File->Open and then select your images:

When selected autostitch will automatically start the stitching process:

When stitching is finished -- autostitch will create a pano.jpg image in the same directory:

As you see - pano.jpg have those black areas at the top and bottom. You must crop them out... Here is how to do it with GIMP:

But you can use any other photo-processing software...

And then you can play with the saturation, contrast, color balance, and similar options... And here is the result:

Click here to see it on panoye.com.

This is how I make my panoramas. But, I'm a programmer, not a professional photographer and there are many subleties I don't know. Feel free to comment on how to make this tutorial better!