Last weekend, I took my lazy derriére—all geared up with camera and tripod—up the Kent Ridge to take pictures. The excursion's primary goal was take a set of photos to create a panorama; a secondary objective was to try and shoot manual—this one was not all that successful.
I spent two hours walking the ridge and shooting—truth be told, there was a lot of cursing because I have no practice on handling the aperture and shutter dials for manual shooting. I liked two or three of the almost one hundred pictures I shoot. Today, I sat down and decided to take these ten pictures and try to make a panorama.
First, there's a nice free GPL program for creating panoramas: Hugin. Sources and binaries for Linux/Win 7/Mac are available at Hugin download. The installer is very simple to follow and you will be playing with Hugin in a blink.
Hugin welcomes you with a tip. Dismiss it and the Panorama Stitcher's assistant is ready to upload the base pictures. Click on Load Images, select your images and load them into the stitcher. Now, click on Align, relax, go for a drink, it takes time for the stitcher to process your images. Once the images are aligned, click on Create Panorama, a window with the preview will pop up. In my case, the stitcher did a great job aligning the images so I just went back to the Assistant window and clicked on the Optimizer tab and ask the program to run a crop optimization for itself. Then, I went to the Exposure tab, chose the low dynamic range option and asked the program to run a optimization for itself. Finally, I went to the Stitcher tab, asked the program to Calculate Optimal Size and then Save the Project and Send to Batch. The batch processor will pop up, here you can toy with more things but I just processed my file, this was the result:
You can see the same image at my Picasa were you can zoom it as much as you want, just follow this link.
As you can see, the exposure optimizer does a great job. I tried to equalize the exposure of the original raw files with Raw Therapee before manipulating them in Hugin but, as you can see with the original ten files, the different exposure levels were still clearly visible. Please excuse the distorted horizon, I'm still trying to learn how to compensate for geometric distortion.
In summary, Hugin does a great job stitching panoramas. It basically did all the work by itself from aligning to balancing exposure. Awesome program.
I spent two hours walking the ridge and shooting—truth be told, there was a lot of cursing because I have no practice on handling the aperture and shutter dials for manual shooting. I liked two or three of the almost one hundred pictures I shoot. Today, I sat down and decided to take these ten pictures and try to make a panorama.
First, there's a nice free GPL program for creating panoramas: Hugin. Sources and binaries for Linux/Win 7/Mac are available at Hugin download. The installer is very simple to follow and you will be playing with Hugin in a blink.
Hugin welcomes you with a tip. Dismiss it and the Panorama Stitcher's assistant is ready to upload the base pictures. Click on Load Images, select your images and load them into the stitcher. Now, click on Align, relax, go for a drink, it takes time for the stitcher to process your images. Once the images are aligned, click on Create Panorama, a window with the preview will pop up. In my case, the stitcher did a great job aligning the images so I just went back to the Assistant window and clicked on the Optimizer tab and ask the program to run a crop optimization for itself. Then, I went to the Exposure tab, chose the low dynamic range option and asked the program to run a optimization for itself. Finally, I went to the Stitcher tab, asked the program to Calculate Optimal Size and then Save the Project and Send to Batch. The batch processor will pop up, here you can toy with more things but I just processed my file, this was the result:
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| The West Coast from Kent Ridge. |
As you can see, the exposure optimizer does a great job. I tried to equalize the exposure of the original raw files with Raw Therapee before manipulating them in Hugin but, as you can see with the original ten files, the different exposure levels were still clearly visible. Please excuse the distorted horizon, I'm still trying to learn how to compensate for geometric distortion.
In summary, Hugin does a great job stitching panoramas. It basically did all the work by itself from aligning to balancing exposure. Awesome program.
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