found drama

Spent about an hour messing around with hugin again tonight. The last couple of panoramics I have stitched together in PhotoStitch have been … disappointing. It mostly has to do with the seams; no matter what I try, there appears to be too much “vignetting” going on at those seams. The tripod has not really helped with that much; nor has cleaning the lens more frequently. I am left with the belief that PhotoStitch is what is doing it to me.

I keep getting tips via Flickr for AutoStitch but the Mac software that incorporates their API ¹ is all on a trial basis. And while the Autopano Pro demo gave me some nice (watermarked) results, I just don’t know if I’m ready to drop 99 Euros on that part of my hobby.

So back to hugin…

I gave it a whirl a few months back and didn’t get too far but decided to give it another go after my most recent pano. Faint as the seam may be, they have started to grate on me. Though there is a certain “charm” in the intentional discontinuities of a hand-stitch (and/or the pride of a well-executed hand-stitch), I’ve gotten used to spending a few minutes instead of a few hours putting each of these together.

At any rate, tonight’s experiments did not yield the results I was hoping for. I got the hang of the control points and some of hugin’s other features but the end-results were not much improved. There were still some pretty obvious seams, I thought. Except rather than vertical, blurry grey lines, these were… Well, they were all manner of strange angles. I have not given up on hugin. I intend to try again with a different batch of images, for one. There are also vignetting controls that I am assuming are there for exactly the reasons I have in mind. If only I could figure out what those cryptic fields mean.

1. If that’s the correct term here. Maybe “framework” is more appropriate here?  Whatever.[↩]

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