Create panoramas stitching photos together with Hugin
My lovely wee NEX-6 camera has the ability to provide me with panorama photographs created within the camera. It works, but I don't find it particularly easy to make it work. Sometimes it gives me the message that I am moving too fast with the camera and that even happens when I'm moving my camera very slow indeed. I sometimes think that's the wind has to be blowing in the right direction for me to be able to get the panoramic photo application working right on the camera. So I wanted to find a different way to do this, but not using Photoshop and I found a Mac application called Hugin. This application works quite well indeed for stitching together a number of photos into one single photo.
As simple as one, two, three
Hugin is quite a complex application in that it gives you lots of different options that you can choose from when you want to create a panorama photo. Having said that, it is possible to use this application in simple mode and then it is a case of steps one, two and three. Step one is to bring the photos into the application, step two is to align those photos by clicking on a button and step three is to create the panorama image. If you are not sure about any of the other possible configurations and changes that you can make within the application, you only have two press those three buttons and you will get a good panorama image. Assuming of course you took some good shots in the first place.
Seven different types of panorama to choose from
There are about seven different panorama types that you can choose from and in this tutorial I show you how to use either the rectilinear or the cylindrical panorama types. In the final images there is not a huge difference between the two. With the cylindrical panorama I found that the middle part of the image seemed to be a little bit closer in terms of the depth of the photo.
You can choose from three different file types when you output to the finished panorama you have the TIFF image, the JPEG image or a PNG image. If you use the TIFF image for your panorama it will be quite large, but you will get the best quality. I used the JPEG format and I was happy enough with the outcome. I stitched together eight photos and I am sure that I got a good result from this by having enough of an overlap in between each of the photos. I took all of the photos handheld and as there was some distance from the subject matter I was taking the photograph of it really didn't matter that I wasn't using a tripod. You can use this application even with cheap camera as well as with DSLR cameras or like me with mirrorless cameras like my Sony NEX6.
I finished off the photo post processing by using Intensify Pro plug in with Aperture on my Mac.
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