On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:59:36 +0200, Mark Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > Roger Howard wrote: > >> You blending exposures from a stack of images, or trying to stitch a >> pano? > > Forgive me for butting in. Ever since Jared started posting his HDR > stuff, I've been looking at it and liking it, but haven't done anything > about it. (That happens to me a lot and I'm not sure its so bad > actually.) Anyway, when you (Roger) twittered/tweeted/twat about Hugin, > I had a look at it myself... > > Executive summary from poorly informed outsider: It *looks* like the > suite's strength is as a pan tool that can *also* do exposure masking > and that it uses its stitching algorithms, to help it line up shots for > masking. Does that sound vaguely right ?
Well, exposure blending is a core need in any panoramic workflow, so a *lot* of the most active development is happening there. Hugin is an open source project that continues where PanoTools left off... I actually use a closed-source cousin, PTGUI (PT=PanoTools, originally) to do my panoramic work for the most part. Where I use Hugin is actually when I want to use just parts of the tool - since pretty much every major function in the app is managed by a simple command line tool on the backend, with a (typically ugly, fragile) GUI on top. So if you need a bunch of best-of-breed, one-trick-pony imaging utilities, Hugin is a great place to look. I wouldn't really say it's a stitching suite first - most of the components are more general than that, it's just the GUI that is designed to favor panoramic workflow. But when you need excellent image registration then, for instance, autopano-sift-c + nona is excellent. If you need to seamlessly blend overlapping images of any kind, enblend is first-rate. If you need a great exposure mask creator, enfuse... etc. > I, on the other hand, can be fairly sure that after an hour of CLI near > misses, I'll switch to the GUI. Gotcha - well if you want just a nice GUI for blending images, there's the venerable Photomatix (it's all about the HDR), there's Photoshop itself, Bracketeer (which is a GUI front-end to enfuse, but may not handle image registration well from what Jared said) and others. Since this is a pretty geeky crowd, I thought I'd share the fun backend stuff. Most of my work for a few years before my current job (doing digital asset mgmt at a certain popular MMO developer) involved high-volume image processing using components like these wherever possible in order to minimize time spend in Photoshop and in studio. As a panoramic photographer I've also been involved in the PanoTools world for at least a decade now, so I know most of the guys who work on Hugin, PTGUI, etc. _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
