Download Free Panorama Photo Stitching Software

Jump to Following Panorama Tutorials

• Stitching Two Photographs

• Stitching Multi-Row Photos

• Creating a QTVR Quicktime 360° x 360° Spherical Panorama

• Simple Lens Calibration

• Correcting Chromatic Abberations

• Correcting Colour Distortion Vignetting

2. Check Your Camera

Once you have your images collected, it's time to review the camera and lens properties. Every lens is different, even if they're the same model by the same manufacturer.

You may want to configure your lens properties, if you know them, on Hugin's Camera and Lens tab.

Hugin can automatically determine some of the properties of your lens, just by studying how the features match up in the overlapping areas.

3. Create Your Control Points

Here's where you'll spend most of your time when creating a new panorama. Llike sewing two pieces of fabric together, you must choose a series of corresponding locations between each overlapping pair of images. Hugin will calculate the best way to align your photographs.

On Hugin's Control Points tab, you can see a pair of images you've included in your project. Each image has a number, and you can choose which two images are shown by selecting their numbers at any time using the numbered tabs.

Choose two different images which are overlap each other then find a distinctive feature which is visible in both images for example find the corner of a building's window or rooftop, or maybe a distinctive rock on the ground. The sharper and more contrast, the better. Click on that feature in both images. A control point pair is made.

Add at least three or four pairs of control points within the same pair of images, and you'll see them added to Hugin's list. Each pair is shown in a unique matching color. Once you have enough pairs, you can move on to a different pair of images, and repeat the process.

Tips on Choosing Image Features

You will find it easier if you zoom in to your picture. It may take more time scrolling around the picture, but you can choose and place your points much more precisely when you can see the fine details in each image giving you a perfect stitch.

Turn on the "Auto Fine-Tune" feature to allow Hugin to adjust your points for the best fit. However, you should still review those results and manually adjust them if the are not precisely targeting the same points. Hugin may be confused if there are a number of similar features nearby, like a row of identical windows so it is a good idea to check all your points.

Avoid adding points that are too close to the image edges, where your camera's lens doesn't focus or perform as well especially when using a fish-eye lens.

If you took the photographs without a panoramic head for your camera tripod, don't choose any features in the near foreground for control points. You'll likely encounter parallax error, which can confuse Hugin during optimization. Outdoor scenes where most features are in the distance will have less of a problem with parallax.

4. Run the Optimizer

Now it's Hugin's turn to do some fancy math work. You have several choices you can make, which will affect the style of your panorama or mosaic stitch you want to produce, all available on Hugin's Optimizer tab.

The most important button is "Optimize Now!" It's so important, that you can run Hugin's Optimizer at any time, from any tab, using the quick button on the Hugin toolbar.

Hugin will start computing the best distortions for your images, as soon as you press the Optimize Now button. A progress window opens to show the current displacement. Hugin tries to minimize that number. When Hugin can't get any lower, no matter how it tries, the Optimizer is done.

For your first pass, just optimize the yaw, pitch and roll of your images. (That's the Optimizer's default.)

As a guideline, the average error should be less than 1 pixel for an excellent fit, and the maximum error should only be 5 pixels or less. Of course, this varies with the quality of the original images, as well as placement of the control points.

If you're getting bigger numbers, then it's time to review those control points. Bring up the Control Point Table with another button found on Hugin's toolbar. You can find the worst error offenders here; click on any line to show that control point pair. You can decide what to do with those bad fits: delete or reposition those points.

If your points look good, but the average error is still too high, add more control point pairs. You want to create a nice spread between your control points, and not just a couple in a straight line.

Once you get good results, you can get better results by optimizing more variables. You can optimize for every variable at once, but this is slower, and can even fail if your initial guesses weren't good enough.

Some stitches require many runs of the Optimizer, and many returns to the Control Points tab, before you find your best possible results. Watch the Panorama Druid in the Preview window for more tips on getting a great alignment.

Understanding Projection Types

There are three major types of projection. Understanding their differences will be useful in getting the mosaic you imagined.

Rectilinear

A rectilinear lens is a photographic lens that yields images where straight features, such as the walls of buildings, appear with straight lines, as opposed to being curved. In other words, it is a lens with little barrel or pincushion distortion.

Most camera lenses are designed to keep any straight lines in your subject as straight as possible in the image. This mosaic projection continues that goal. It's great for architecture since you can be sure that the roofs and walls don't curve unexpectedly. A mosaic in this mode emulates a single image taken with a wider angle rectilinear lens.

The downside to a rectilinear projection is stretching. You will notice that the photographs get stretched out more and more, as they get farther from the Yaw=0, Pitch=0 center point. The corners of the photograph may even stretch into a sort of butterfly arrangement. This means that you will have to crop down to a center portion of the image, and you won't be able to make really immersive images.

Cylindrical

A cylindrical lens is a lens which focuses light which passes through onto a line instead of onto a point, as a spherical lens would. The curved face or faces of a cylindrical lens are sections of a cylinder, and focus the image passing through it onto a line parallel to the intersection of the surface of the lens and a plane tangent to it.

Another projection works to combat the image stretching problem. Each source image is projected onto a surface such that the area it occupies is as close to the original area as possible.

Equirectangular

The equirectangular projection (also called the equidistant cylindrical projection, geographic projection, plate carrée or carte parallelogrammatique projection or CPP) is a very simple map projection attributed to Marinus of Tyre. It is also way of viewing a full 360 x 360 degree cylindrical panoramic picture flat on a screen. as the picture below.

The last projection is also the most immersive: each source image is calculated to represent a certain view window in space. Some images can be stitched directly overhead or underfoot to achieve a complete spherical bubble containing the viewer.
< Equirectangular Panorama e

5. Run the Stitcher

After all of the other steps are complete, Hugin is ready to crunch some pixels. You can request a final mosaic on the Stitcher tab. This is a computationally intensive step, and will need a lot of memory to perform all the image processing required.

Similar in layout to the Optimizer tab, you will find the key button is labeled "Stitch Now!"

Hugin will load each image in turn, and distort it according to the required projection. If requested, it will then work to adjust the exposure for color and/or brightness. Lastly, it will blend all of the images together into the final image file you specify.