deandra.homeip.net

Mad Propz to Hugin. This thing makes stitching together multiple shots into a single panorama about as easy as falling over.

Years ago, I purchased a handheld scanner, a Logitech Scanman 256, if I remember correctly. Of course, with a scanning width of only a little over 10cm, it was difficult to scan an entire page into the computer. However, the scanner did come with automatic stitching software, that would take the multiple scans and build a composite. This was my first experience with stitching software, and remained my only experience until recently.

Fast-forward to about six months ago. I'd run across Hugin somewhere, maybe I was looking to make a one-off panorama photo; at any rate, I quickly forgot about it until today when I was reading Mike's blog, where he mentioned Hugin. Since I've just bought a new camera, I figured I'd give it another whack.

Hugin is a frontend to Panorama Tools, and makes these powerful command-line tools extremely easy to use. When I first started the program, I was met with an assitant that contained three buttons: Load Images, Align, and Create Panorama. I loaded me images, and aligned them. At this point I was presented with a window previewing my panorama. I adjusted the field of view to crop off the wavy black sections at the top and the bottom, and then clicked the final button. After a few minutes I was given a TIFF image, which I've converted to a JPG and uploaded to my Gallery.

The only trouble I'm having so far is getting the EXIF data to be carried through to the final JPG - Somewhere between Hugin and the GIMP (which I used to convert the TIFF into a JPEG), the camera make and model got lost. Not really a big deal, but it would be nice to have for historical purposes.

All in all, though, I'd say that Hugin is awesome, and will remain a part of my digital darkroom for the foreseeable future.