I, the DSLR Dummy: Panoramas with Hugin

I have been trying my patience with panoramas in the last months. I have been using a nice GPL stitching software called Hugin that basically does everything by itself. It is trivial to install Hugin in any computer as there are compiled versions for unix, windows and mac. 

In the most basic mode, you select a series of overlapping pictures and let Hugin do its magic. Of course, it is a matter of taking the right pictures or calamity strikes as you can see from one of the first panoramas that I stitched:

Clarke Quay from Brewerkz, Singapore 2011.

These are some six photographs taken from an un-leveled tripod without minding the distance between the  first objects and the camera. I am a lucky guy and the result is not an eye sore but it was sheer luck that the distorted perspective came out somehow right. 

The nice thing about Hugin is that, once you level the tripod for the axis of the camera to coincide with the tripod's axis of rotation and take care for the subject to be far from the lens, it is trivial to get a nice cylindrical  projection panorama:

Harbour Front from Mt. Fabor, Singapore 2011. 

These are some eight photographs taken from a leveled and aligned tripod. Again, it was sheer luck that I got such a nice effect with the sunset at the right.  

But not everything is oats with honey, once you shoot without some stabilization or a scene that has moving parts, such as cars in a city, things get a little bit messy; for example, this one is a composition of ten pictures taken from a standing position without tripod:

Zurich Sea from Grossmunster, Zurich 2011.

I was afraid that my epileptic pulse will screw things up so I took some twenty three shoots; only ten were useful in the composition of this panorama. Even worse, Hugin didn't manage to recognize overlaps and treated the pics as independent. The good thing is that once this happens, Hugin takes you to the control point window automatically, there you can manually input control points on contiguous photographs. It seems like the best approach is to identify two sets of parallel lines, one pair of vertical and one of horizontal lines, in each pair of overlapping pics. It sounds like a hard task, but the fine tune button helps a lot in identifying the right points and it only took me around half an hour to set three hundred control points for the panorama above. I want to think that the result is not that bad after cropping it a little.

In short, for those doing this just for the sake of keeping a memory and having a hobby, or running on a tight budget like me, Hugin is a great option for stitching panoramas. It has a great automatic recognition of control points that does the work for you most of the time—so far I only had to do manual selection of control points in one out of seven panoramas—, a good selection of projection algorithms—I have only played with cylindrical projections so far— and it is for free; if you like and use it, don't forget to make a donation to the Hugin project!

I hope you enjoy your stitching as much as I do. Here are some of the panoramas I have stitched so far.