Hugin 2009.2.0

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