[ptx] hugin and enblend?

[Rob Park]

Rob Park wrote:
> Jean-Luc Coulon (f5ibh) wrote:
>> What is you workflow ?
>> I use autopano to creates the contrl points
>> Hugin for optimisation and stitching.
>> If you plan to use enblend (recommended) you must save your picture 
>> as  multi-tiff
>> Then feed these multi-tiff pictures in enblend and you are done.
> 
> I had bad results with autopano, so I make the control points myself in
> hugin. Then I optomise it, and output to jpeg. The thing is, when I was
> comparing the results of just using hugin to hugin+enblend, I ended up
> with a 2MB JPEG file and a 90MB tiff file of the same scene, and they
> looked pretty much identical (i was not able to find any differences,
> aside from the size/format of the files).
> 
> Yes, when I used enblend, I output to multiple tiffs and then ran
> enblend on them, the tiff it made looked the same as the JPEG straight
> from hugin.

Ok, I have been experimenting with this quite a bit today, and I think I 
have figured it out!

First, I tried out autopano-sift, and I was very impressed with the 
results. On the downside, it seemed that there were many points that 
overlapped (two points on the exact same spot), and the spots seemed to 
be in stupid places (points being in a solid black area when they could 
have been on the corner of a nearby building which provided more 
detail), but aside from that, the points themselves seemed to be 
identical between images, so the resulting panorama was good. It took 
only a little bit of tweaking, in the form of "finetune all points" and 
then checking each point one by one to make sure they were where they 
should have been. Out of hundreds of points, I think I only manually 
altered 4 or 5 of them.

After that, I put in some horizontal guidelines to straighten out the 
horizon (though looking at my results now, I don't think I used enough). 
Then optomize, etc.

I used nona for stitching, with the output to multiple tiffs, which I 
ran enblend on. Now I see the difference that enblend makes! With nona, 
the edges are hard, with enblend they are much softer... it seems that 
PTStitcher does the softening itself, which is why I was saying I 
couldn't tell the difference before.

So here is my finished result, using autopano-sift, hugin, nona, and 
enblend:

http://rbpark.ath.cx/pictures/pano/college1.jpg

This is actually more than 360 degrees, as there is some overlap on the 
left and right edges of the image. I noticed that there is a dip in the 
horizon, but right now I am just happy that I can no longer find stitch 
lines in the sky!

;)