Painless Panorama Stitching in Linux with Hugin
Getting Started With Hugin
A previous article described how to make small panoramas with fotoxx. But when you get serious about panoramas on Linux, there's really only one answer: Hugin.Named after a raven of Norse legend who brought information to the god Odin, Hugin and the Panorama Tools libraries have been around for years. But until recently they've been quite difficult to use. That's no longer true: today, with just a few clicks, anyone can create a spectacular panorama in Hugin.
Hugin is available as a package on most Linux distros -- so install it and take a look!
Basic Panoramas
The main window starts in the Assistant tab (Figure 1), showing the steps you'll need to follow.
Step 1 is to load your images. In the file selector, you can use Ctrl-click and Shift-click to select all your images at once; no need to load them one by one. Unfortunately, hugin doesn't take note of the directory you're in and there's no way to pass it images from the command line, so you'll have to navigate to wherever your images are.
Step 2: click Align, then go make coffee. This step takes quite a while -- Hugin is doing a lot of math under the hood to adjust for lens warp, find the places where your images overlap and match them all.
Eventually, the Fast Panorama Preview window will appear (Figure 2).
You may need to resize it if it comes up too small.
You'll see obvious seams where one image is darker than the next. Don't worry about that -- Hugin will handle those details later.
Assuming the fast preview looks okay, proceed to Step 3:
- Skip Ahead
- 1. Getting Started With Hugin
- 2. Getting Started With Hugin