Hi Folks:
Since it's Sunday I thought I'd mess around a bit. I posted before about an open source panorama software program called Hugin that I'd found - I've really liked it, and managed to put together a few images like these, even hand held.
[attachment=16563:DSCF4731_P.jpg]
[attachment=16564:DSCF5021_P.jpg]
[attachment=16565:DSCF5061_P.jpg]
However, I have had some problems with incorrect stitches, even tripod mounted, and also with HDR images. I downloaded a trial version of Autopano Pro, which unlike Hugin isn't open source and retails for about $160 Cdn.
I also have Timothy Armes' Lightroom-Enfuse HDR plugin, so I added that into the mix. I made nine images (3 images x 3 exposures, at -1, 0 +1) of a flower garden, using my little walkaround camera, the Fuji S1500FD, mounted on a rail on a tripod. I tried creating panoramas using both programs, in two ways. One, I imported the nine images into the two programs and let them run. Second, I created blended images of each of the three sets of three images using Enfuse, and then imported those three images into the two panorama programs. I had found before that the second method
produced better results in Hugin. I imported the images into Lightroom for cropping where necessary but made no further adjustments, and exported them all as a maximum of 1024 pixels. Because the Autopano Pro is a trial version, the images have a watermark on them, but other than that they're supposed to be the same as the full version of the software.
So, the straight images:
Hugin
[attachment=16559:DSCF5225_PH.jpg]
Autopano Pro
[attachment=16558:DSCF5225_PAP.jpg]
Then the blended images (using the Enfuse plugin in Lightroom)
Hugin
[attachment=16557:DSCF5225_blend_PH.jpg]
Autopano Pro
[attachment=16556:DSCF5225_blend_PAP.jpg]
Finally, I took one set of three images, and tried processing it three ways - using Enfuse, Hugin, and Autopano Pro. The results are:
Enfuse
[attachment=16560:DSCF5234_blend.jpg]
Hugin
[attachment=16562:DSCF5234_blendH.jpg]
Autopano Pro
[attachment=16561:DSCF5234_blendAP.jpg]
Overall I found the Autopano Pro images a bit dark, but I could bring that up well using the Fill Light slider. The Hugin panoramas had some serious mismatch problems with the fence on the upper left, but the Autopano Pro images did not. There's also a few flowers missing from the Hugin panoramas that are present in the Autopano Pro images. Finally, the Hugin images are quite flat in comparison.
Finally, with the single HDR image, Hugin didn't seem to know what to do with it. I checked the control points manually and they seemed to line up fine. I made sure I had had the projection set to rectilinear, but nothing seemed to matter. Of the remaining two, I found little difference. The Autopano Pro image is darker than the Enfuse image, but they could be edited to be nearly identical, I think.
Mike.