[ptx] Hugin vs. PTGui - some observations

[Mike Runge]

Hi,
I posted this one as a reply to panotoolsNG, but I think it belongs to this list. Unfortunately I could not crosspost :-(

A friend of mine bought PTGui - so we were sitting together trying Hugin and PTGui on the same panorama (6 6MP images taken with the Sigma 8mm).

The main advantage of PTGui I have observed:
It's dammend easy for beginners. The simple mode developed a good result just clicking a handful of buttons without knowing how panotools are 'ticking' - great!
This is very remarkable since in the early days of hugin one of Pablo's major targets was to develop an easy to use/learn panorama frontend. I think hugin is stable, comfortable, easy to use, but  it's definitevely not easy to learn.

Things have changed a lot and meanwhile it's easier than ever to start developing panoramas. Hugin (and PTGui as well) gives you a complete package and straight from downloading and installing you can start - that's really cool.

Hugin isn't able to detect the correct lens setting for my old Sigma 8mm MF - PTGui can. If you have a file stored with the lens setting you found once you're fine. I think Hugin will address this by using the ptlens database soon?!

PTGui can find the right cropcircle automatically - cool! Not a big deal in Hugin (just 2 clicks), but a newbie will not know that such a function is there and what it is good for.

Using autopano-sift/autopano within hugin is fine. Best results I get using autopano-sift without ransac check. So there are wrong controlpoints I need to filter for. Usually I optimize 2-4 times and delete the points with very large values  using the controlpointlist. That are only a few clicks, but a newbie will stumble on this.

The default optimization method of hugin is very helpful to detect wrong points and to bring the images into a general order. For good results you need to select another method (maybe "All" or "Custom"). Having not enough cp's, no verticals/horizontals or only many cp's, that are crowded around the center this can result in settings that are less good (Hugin reports that, like PTGui does). That's not an issue and due to UNDO etc. this can be easily and quickly solved. But a newbie would stumble here again. I think PTGui optimizes only y,p,r,b (and v?!) in simple mode to avoid those situations.

Preview in hugin is fine and fast and automatically updated if needed - well done! It also show's you the influence of the vignetting tool!!! 

You can use Hugin to try finding the the correct vignetting parameters (works fine, but very slow) or easily prove your own flatfiles - cool!
I'm thankful for the vignetting capabilities although I think this belongs into a RAW converter (for a professional workflow). But it's very useful for newbies that it is in - thanks a lot. I would like to have an additional ruler here to adjust the strenght of the correction (moving the polynom curve up and down). In practise, I think, one would correct hard vignetting not fully and let enblend/smartblend do the rest?!.  

Stitching tab is simple and fine. One bug here.
It can happen, that calculating the optimal output size can lead to an odd pixel value for width (and therefore to an not matching value for height)!

In the end, the result in Hugin (using my usual technique) was better (less stitching errors) than in PTGui using simple mode. Deleting one wrong controlpoint in PTGui (using the controlpoint list) and adding 2 addional points finally leaded to very similar results. 

Two intersting observations:
We got a fieldofview of ~181 deg in PTgui and ~177 in Hugin?!
We got a size of 5???x2??? pixel in PTGui and 6???x3??? (what we expected) in PTGui?! How can I find out what the correct optimal size is?

My recommendations to make Hugin more newby-friendly:
- A wizard/druid (maybe a range of wizards "Spherical with Fish", "Multirow with Rect", etc..) that triggers autopano/-sift with useful parameters, does basic optimisation and cp filtering, stable post-optimisation, comes up with a preview and shows a short report what you can do next to improve your panorama (or a button "Stitch Now?").

- A bad-cp-filtering-by-optimisation tool would be nice as well for advanced users.

- A basic HTML creation tab (just some fields for author, title, template, etc.) to create a folder with ptviewer, an html file (using a HTML template file), and the equirectangular image in would be a nice goodie for beginners too.  
 
best, mike
----- Original Message -----
From: jdsmith at as.arizona.edu <JD Smith>
To: PanoToolsNG at yahoogroups.com
Date: 31.07.2006 19:42:48
Subject: [PanoToolsNG] Re: hugin 0.6 - amazing!
>             On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 05:10:39 +0000, yuval_levy wrote:
> 
> 
> Since most of us Hugin users do not use PTGui, I wonder if you could go
> into more detail on where the inefficiencies are?  Some are obvious, but
> some we probably aren't even aware of.  Did you have a chance to evaluate
> the automatic vignetting and TCA corrections (unique among PanoTools
> front-ends, I believe)?
> 
> JD