[ptx] Some Hugin enhancement requests

[Mike Runge]

Hello Pablo, hello all,

I collected some enhancements to hugin, which I would find very useful,
please comment:

- there is no field in the stitcher tab to specify a feather width for
nona,
============================================================================
 even nona is using the default value of 10.
For my understanding feathering is unnessesairy while using enblend. And
it's disturbing while trying to stitch cube faces using nona.


- Ignore/select individual images for some actions:
====================================================
   - for optimisation (to ignore/select controlpoints belonging to
specific images)
   - for stitching    (to select/ignore sets of images for stitching, eg.
for faster checking of individual areas)
That would allow more flexible optimisations and partial stitching. Could
maybe implemented as checkboxes in front of each row in optimisation tab
and ONE additional checkbox "stitch only images selected for
optimisation" in the stitcher tab. I would really appriciate to have
that.

- Multiple select functionality (using shift and control keys) in
==================================================================
Optimisation tab.
=================
I would really like to have that!

- A kind of weight mechanismn for optimisation to support difficult
optimisation problems (need to explain that, it's simpler, than it
sounds):
Imagine you have a clearly visible stitching mismatch on a specific area
(maybe a splitted corner of a building or so). You may think, that this
building corner is much more important than the rest of this image pair,
because here a stitching mismatch is far more visible. The appropriate
method in this case is to add more points to this section. Or - for lazy
people - just duplicate the one or two points at the building edge
directly in the script. The downside: You need to search for the point
in the scriptfile and you need to reload the script, which can take some
time.

- first approach to hugin (should be easy to implement)
Provide a button in the control points tab to dublicate one (or more)
selected control points

- second approach (maybe difficult to implement)
Provide an additional field 'weigth' for each row in the controlpoints
region. Default value is '1' (one control point pair). Keyin in
different values (2,3) will duplicate these points in the scriptfile (at
least for the ptstitcher export format), but hugin will still show this
couple of points as one with the correcponding weight. don't no, how to
implement that?! Maybe a new hugin specific parameter in the pto-file
line, or hugin has to filter the points while reading the file and show
identical controlpoint lines as one with a higher weight?!

I would expect this to allow the user more fexible and comfortable fixing
of difficult areas. Especially with autopano and lot's of controlpoints
it can be difficult to 'tweak' a specific area. Picking the points by
hand you normally take care automatically selecting points at important
sections. Maybe the second approach is to much work for just making it
more 'readable'?! The first one should not be a big problem?!


- extended functionality for preview
====================================
- make it easier to find out, what image# corresponds a specific  part of
the preview.
It's often easy to see, that two images are not matching very good, but
it can be hard to find out that these images are image#24 and #33.
Ideally I would like to click directly into the preview to switch between
show/hide - that would also change the appereance of the corresponding
hide/show button in the top line. Maybe that is very difficult to
implement, but any other method to simplify detection of visible
mismatches (watermark with number in the images?!) would be appriciated.

- provide some kind of zoom/scale functionality
The preview is very good and fast now. But while working with multirows
or very large panos it suffers from the fixed scale and large empty
regions. In my case, I often do multirows with the lowest row at pitch=0
and 2 or 3 rows above. In that case, nearly the half of the preview
screen is black and therefore the preview is too small to be really
usefull. Could we have a modifiable preview scale (and scrollbars) or
zoom functionality or so? BTW_ The panodruid is wasting some space here
as well. I like the idea of the druid, but I would more like to see him
in a standalone window, eg. by pressing a button "check pano" or so.


- new image format 'enblended Tiff' for nona.
=============================================
We had the question "How to use enblend within hugin" several times in
the list. so it looks like, that it's not very intuitiv to select that
method. That would obsolete the 'Soft Blending' checkbox and would be
more intutiv (hopefully).

- additional field 'converter multiplier' in 'Design Parameters' in
'camera
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and lens' tab.
===============
Even if we have import/export for lens parameter files, can we have an
additional multiplier (default=1)?

Ok, that are my wishes/suggestions. I hope, that you will find some of
them usefull and hopefully they are possible to implement.

best, mike