I was trying to stitch photos into a panorama view (wide angle - not a 360 degree view). And many in a forum would say use Photoshop (PS), but I do not have this software and am trying to use a freeware.
I did a search on Google and found this Hugin 0.7 software, actually also Auto-stitch (which has a time limited usage) and PanoTools.
It was sure a journey of lots of techincal experiment.
Hugin is very unfriendly in usage (due to the technical issues), BUT a great tool that really does a great job.
So here I will try and document the process and hopefully can be use for myself and others as a reference.
The four unstitched images (all have been resized for Internet posting, they are actually 8.2 MPixel images).
Then I run Hugin which is a Window's program. Loading the images are easy, but do not use the auto feature to generate the control points. Control points are points on 2 adjancent images that suppose to overlap.
In the Control Point Tab, you can first add your own control points (I add 5 to a pair of adjacent photos). Picture 1 and 2 - 5 points, Picture 2 and 3 - 5 points, picture 3 and 5 - last 5 points.
Then I use the button to auto add another 10 points.
On the preview you will be able to see nicely created merge of the 4 photos, don't be alarm that they are actually overlapping (in my case my wife appeared in 2 places on the panaroma preview).
Another point is that YOU HAVE TO USE digital images with their EXIF info intact. Earlier attempts of jpf files which I have edited lost all the EXIF and the program just does not work well at all. Join using the original Digital Images first, then edit the panaroma later.
There is a freeware call Autopano-SIFT which is window based, and does the auto setting of control points, and output a file with extension .pto.
This file can be opened by Hugin as a project and the control points will be there.
But as I mentioned, it is best to first add your own control points, then let Hugin to add the auto ones.
Once the photos are aligned, the next step is to stitch them.
Hugin default is nova stitch engine, which do not seem to be able to output the TIFF file. Nova alots smoothening when you output TIF format. But since it does not output, I changed from nova to Ptstitcher (select from the dropdown list). In the File > Preference - you can set the location for the ptstitcher.exe program (which I get from PanaTools).
Then you can set auto adjust color and brightness. And I output as jpeg format. It does the smoothening of the cutted and joined lines, making it very difficult to detect where the photos were cutted and joined.
Sorry, the sequencing of the photos is beyond my control in this blog page.
Hope you find them useful.
