aaron c beals

on my recent trip to San Francisco, i had the opportunity to catch a Giants game at AT&T Park, which is a phenomenal place. of course, it doesn’t have the old-school charm of Fenway, but this also means you’re facing the diamond in every seat and there’s enough legroom. the park is right on the water, which means the views from the top deck are excellent. anyhow, this post isn’t about that.

the issue i had was that i only had our Canon Elph point-and-shoot, rather than the 5D or 20D with a wide-angle or fisheye lens, so i couldn’t capture the entire park in one shot. (and honestly, i still think that it would have been tough with a wider lens.) so instead, i took a series of shots with the intention of stitching them together later. now, i’ve done this before (during our trip to France in 2003, for instance), but what ends up happening is that the individual pictures sit around on my hard drive waiting for me to go through the painstaking process.

in order to avoid repeating this scenario, i did a little searching online and found that there are two options:
1) do it yourself with Photoshop
2) use Panorama Tools

seeing as option #1 wasn’t working for me, i decided to explore option #2. it turns out that the Panorama Tools software is a set of open-source libraries created by Helmut Dersch and released under the LGPL. they’re very powerful, but unfortunately are also very hard to use, as they have to be configured and accessed programatically. as fun as per-job script-writing is, i decided to keep exploring.

what i found were two very highly-rated commercial UI’s built on top of Panorama Tools: PTgui and PTAssembler. they are both powerful, simple, and even automate much of the manual work required. unfortunately, both of these tools are not only commercial, they are expensive. before shelling out money, i wanted to see what else was out there…

…and i found hugin. this is a free, open-source software package that provides much of the same functionality as the commercial products. it even integrates with other open-source plugins for edge blending and automatic connector point generation. the latter is the real time-consuming and difficult part of the process: identifying points on different images that represent the same location in space, so the software knows how to overlay, modify, and connect the images. you can do this manually, but the plugin does a very good job of auto-discovery.

see for yourself: