Shallow Thoughts : tags : panorama

Hugin part 2: Rescuing Difficult Panoramas

Part 2 in my Hugin series is out, in which I discuss how to rescue difficult panoramas that confuse Hugin.

Hugin is an amazing program, but if you get outside the bounds of the normal "Assistant" steps, the user interface can be a bit confusing -- and sometimes it does things that are Just Plain Weird. But with help from some folks on IRC, I found out that a newer version of Hugin can fix those problems, and worked out how to do it (as well as lots of ways that seemed like they should work, but didn't).

Read the gory details in: Hugin part 2: Rescuing Difficult Panoramas.

There will be a Hugin Part 3, and possibly even a Part 4, discussing things Hugin can do beyond panoramas.

Tags: writing, linux, graphics, panorama, hugin
[ 14:58 Sep 09, 2010    More writing | permalink to this entry | ]

Painless Panorama Stitching with Hugin

A couple of weeks ago in my Fotoxx article I discussed using Fotoxx to create panoramas.

But for panoramas bigger than a couple of images, you're much better off using the Linux panorama app: Hugin.

Hugin is very impressive, and much too capable to be summarized in a single short article, so I'm planning three. This week's article is a basic introduction: Painless Panorama Stitching with Hugin.

Tags: writing, linux, graphics, panorama, hugin
[ 15:11 Aug 26, 2010    More writing | permalink to this entry | ]

Fotoxx: the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You've Never Heard Of

Dave stumbled on a neat little photo editor while tricking out his old Vaio (P3/650 MHz, 192M RAM) and looking for lightweight apps. It's called Fotoxx and it's quite impressive: easy to use and packed with useful features.

So I wrote about it in this week's Linux Planet article: Fotoxx, the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You've Never Heard Of.

At first, I was most impressed by the Warp tool -- much easier to use than GIMP's IWarp, though it's rather slow and not quite as flexible as IWarp. But once I got to writing the article, I was blown away by two additional features: it has an automatic panorama stitcher and an HDR tool. GIMP doesn't have either of these features, at all.

Now, panorama stitching used to be a big deal, but it isn't so much any more now that Hugin has gotten much easier to use. (My article in two weeks will be about Hugin.) Fotoxx isn't quite that flexible: it can only stitch two images at a time, and can't handle images with a lot of overlap. (But Hugin has some limitations too.)

But HDR -- wow! I've been meaning to learn more about making HDR images in GIMP -- although it has no HDR tool, there are plug-ins to make it a bit easier to assemble one, just like my Pandora plug-in makes it a little easier to assemble panoramas. But now I don't need to -- fotoxx handles it automatically.

I won't be switching from GIMP any time soon for regular photo editing, of course -- GIMP is still much more flexible. But fotoxx is definitely worth a look, and I'll be keeping it installed to make HDR images, if nothing else.

Tags: writing, linux, graphics, panorama, HDR
[ 15:44 Aug 12, 2010    More writing | permalink to this entry | ]