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finally!

finally i found a freeware panorama solution that works!

i confess: up to now i’ve used different unlegal ways to stitch my occasional panorama (read: cracked software), mostly because i just couldn’t cough up the steep amounts of money needed to buy one of these programs.

but now it’s over: last week i stumbled over HuginOSX, a program in the very early steps of development (e.g. experimental builds), but still useable for my needs.

HuginOSX is a free port of hugin to os x (who would have guessed…). hugin is a frontend to the excellent panorama tools by helmut dersch. the panorama tools are a set of scripts and plugins for different programs (like photoshop or graphic converter (both not free, so no option for me)) which give excellent results with panoramic images, and are free like in beer.

as i said before i am quite geeky, but definitely not the cli-person, i prefer to use a GUI for most of the stuff i do. that’s where HuginOSX steps in. you load in all the images you want, define control points (in quite a nifty way i must say: after you’ve defined one or two per image, the program is getting really accurate at suggesting the next matching control points), click on some buttons to optimize the panorama and to run the needed scripts and then can export the image in the desired format.

everything is still a bit rough on the edges – the toolbar is far away from useable, only flashes up for split-seconds – but it looks like HuginOSX is going to become a very important program for me (and my conscience :-).

for good results you should also use enblend, another free piece of software, which nicely blends the seams between the images. the combination ofTateblend

leads to images like the one seen on the right (760kb .jpg, 3410*1186 pixels).

so i guess in the coming weeks i’ll have some panoramas for your delight and to help me master HuginOSX’ hurdles.

[1]: i couldn’t get enblend to work nicely with HuginOSX, so i stumbled over Xblend by Kevin Kratzke [2], another freeware program. Xblend is a front-end to emblend, which itself is also cli-heavy…

[2]: Kevin is the creator of PTMac, a shareware frontend to the PanoTools which i’ve used before, but as i said, i prefer freeware….

Working dad, born at 333 ppm. Generic geek and ex-messenger with a PhD in ultrahigh resolution tomography. I love the outdoors, my bikes, swimming, taking photos and much more.

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  2. Ok, maybe I’m not of real help since I work with PC, but I played also arount with hugin . This is the most powerfull thing I ever saw. I have tons of panoramas on my computer. My showcase file has more than eighty panoramas and they are made with all diferent kinds of tools, but hugin is unbeatable. Ok for ordinary panoramas you can try one of those tools: Canon PhotoStitcher, Panorama Factory or Visual Stitcher. They do all a good job. But if it comes to perfection, special efects (http://allerh.antville.org/stories/1058584/) or bad raw material (http://allerh.antville.org/stories/1057513/) than hugin&Dersch is the best. The disadvantage is the setup and all the switsche to play around. It is much more difficult to run for the ordinary users.
    I was thinking on writing a guide for the tools, but .. I’m still thinking.

    Reply to Peter

  3. Hi, I just wondered how popular HuginOSX is now, and google told me this is the most popular site using HuginOSX. It’s really nice to see someone else using the program. I made this port primarily for myself (that’s why it doesn’t go beyond early stage for long time, though hugin itself is still in bug-full beta stage).
    It took me a while to get used to, and understand, hugin’s stitching process, but it is quite powerful especially with autopano-sift tool that adds control points automatically. If you use QTVRMakePanorama2 or MakeCubic from Apple, you can get free workflow from photo to QTVR movie. The binary file is big because I am linking most of the libraries (incl. jpg, tiff, wxWidget) statically. Otherwise you have to go over all the process I have made in order to get dependent libraries working.
    Well, thank you for using, and let me know if you got stack somehow. Enblend is now working with the new build.

    Reply to Ippei