Hugin 2009.2.0
PANORAMA PHOTO STITCHER.
Online help
Hugin now has comprehensive help documentation for the entire user interface, the manual now includes glossary items explaining many panorama stitching and related photography concepts.
New Assistant panel
Creating simple panoramas is much easier, hugin now starts showing an Assistant with a simple 1-2-3 approach for loading images, aligning and creating the final output.
The Assistant will estimate lens and camera parameters, then pick a suitable output projection and size, advanced options are still available for manual adjustment.
Photometric model
Previous versions of hugin and panotools had basic support for correcting vignetting and exposure differences between photos.
This has been completely overhauled, hugin now internally uses the EMoR model for representing exposure photometrically. This means that the camera response curve, vignetting, colour balance and exposure can now be optimised in much the same way as geometrical properties such as position and lens distortion.
The result is that blending between photos is better than ever before.
HDR
Previously hugin supported High Dynamic Range imaging solely by allowing stitching of HDR floating-point TIFF photos - These images themselves had to be created in another tool.
Now, thanks to the internal photometric model, hugin can now create HDR output from normal exposure bracketed photos. The photos don`t have to be perfectly-aligned, they don`t even need to be nearly-aligned or have consistent exposure differences - The hugin optimiser will sort all this stuff out, and the stitcher will create OpenEXR or TIFF HDR output files for later tonemapping or use as lightprobes.
Exposure blending
HDR and tonemapping isn`t for everybody, enfuse introduced exposure blending to the world, and hugin supports aligning and fusing bracketed stacks of photos, perfectly, all as part of the stitching process.
So now with hugin-0.7.0 and enblend-3.2 you can create realistic, photographic panoramas that have no over-exposed or under-exposed areas.
Makefile stitching
hugin-0.7.0 introduces a new stitching back-end: previously the various stitching tools were executed directly by the GUI, now all the commands required to generate the output are written to a Makefile which is then processed independently of hugin itself.
Aside from easier debugging and customisation; this background stitching allows you to get on with creating a new project while waiting for the previous job to finish - Stitching can also be deferred or shifted to another machine, even `headless` servers can now be used.
Projections
Hugin has always had the ability to save panoramas using simulated normal and fisheye lenses, or 360 degree cylindrical and spherical projections.
Now a whole series of alternative cartographic mappings are available, of particular interest are the `conformal` stereographic and Mercator projections which can be used to show extremely large angles of view with no local distortion.
Project templates
Hugin project files can now be used as templates for new panorama projects. This is useful if you take a lot of panoramas with exactly the same camera positions.
Other improvements
There`s a whole lot of other new stuff in this release: numbering in the control-point editor, straight-line control-points, numeric transform, clicking to rotate the preview, a straighten button, cropping of the output and probably more.
Command-line tools
This release provides new command-line tools:
* align_image_stack: align a nearly-aligned stack of photos
* pto2mk: create a stitching Makefile from a pto project
* vig_optimise: optimise photometric parameters
* tca_correct: calculate lens chromatic aberration
* hugin_hdrmerge: assemble a bracketed stack to HDR
* matchpoint: classify control point features
What is new in 2009.2.0 software version? - Hugin-2009.2.0 release notes Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more. Changes since 0.8.0 The last release in July 2009 introduced several major new features, but took a long time to arrive. This release follows quickly with the intention of tracking development better with more frequent releases, even so we still have some great new features and smaller improvements: Hardware accelerated stitching Hugin ships with nona for reprojecting and distorting photos. Nona will use multiple processors in parallel on a 'multi-core' system, but now it can use the GPU of your graphics hardware instead - Potentially many times faster and freeing your computer for other tasks. This GPU accelerated stitching is still experimental and requires a modern graphics card. Control point creator presets Hugin aligns images by matching features, known as 'control points'. These control points can be created manually in the Hugin Control Points tab or automatically by a 'control point creator'. Due to patent encumbrances in the USA, Hugin doesn't ship with an internal control point creator, but makes it possible to use an external tool such as Autopano-SIFT-C or Pan-o-Matic as a 'plug-in'. Hugin now comes pre-configured with typical settings for common plug-ins and lets you add your own. Switching between tools is now simple - Even allowing you to match different parts of a single project with different plug-ins. Exposure layer fusion Hugin uses two related tools for joining reprojected photos together. Usually any 'bracketed stacks' are first combined with enfuse into a single image using the best exposed bits from each, then these 'exposure fused' images are 'seam blended' with enblend into the final panorama. This works very well, but what if your camera doesn't have a bracketing mode? In this case you have to take an entire panorama, change the EV setting, then take the panorama again, so there is no guarantee any of the shots will line up into 'stacks'. Hugin now has an extra stitching mode where photos with similar exposures are grouped and seam blended into 'layers' with enblend, then these layers are 'exposure fused' into a final panorama with enfuse. Visual control points The last release introduced the Fast Preview window for manipulating the panorama visually in real-time - Coming soon to this window will be some great new features to help you manage every aspect of panorama creation. This release has a taster of these new features, with a new mode to show control points in the Fast Preview window itself. EXIF metadata display Photos produced by digital cameras contain useful hidden metadata such as: date taken, camera model, shutter speed, aperture and focal length. In the Images tab Hugin now displays some useful metadata for the currently selected photo. Languages Most translations have been updated. New version naming It is often noted that with version numbers like 0.8.0, Hugin looked like pre-release software - In reality Hugin is very usable for anyone, from holidaymakers just wanting to stitch a single panorama, to professional photographers and scientists needing a day-to-day workhorse. So in practice, Hugin reached version one a long time ago. With this release we are switching to a date based system similar to many other Open Source software projects. This is the second stable release this year, so we are calling it 2009.2.0, the next stable release this year will also be even-numbered 2009.4.0 and so on. Snapshots of the development trunk would have odd-numbers, e.g. 2009.3.0. Other improvements There are many more improvements to Hugin in this release: More options in the preferences, better error messages for when things do go wrong, fixes for lots of reported bugs, and better support for packagers on BSD, Linux, OS X and Windows. Control point generators Hugin doesn't yet ship with a 'Patent Free' control point generator. So you either need to pick control points manually - Not as difficult as it sounds - or install and configure one of the following control-point generators as 'plug-ins':
- autopano-sift-C
- panomatic
- match-n-shift
- Autopano-SIFT
- Autopano freeware version
