2 image merging from the beach.

[dreed]

(I was going to write this on medium but they wanted my phone number, so forum post it is.)

I do lots of panorama stitching of photos, sometimes to get more megapixels on the subject, sometimes because the field of view is too big for a standard camera/lens. Surprisingly a mechanical failure of a lens on a recent trip meant that would have seen a trio of cameras taking photos was reduced to just two cameras working in tandem. What's even more surprising is that only 1 application will stitch them: hugin.

The two pictures that I'm attempting to merge are of a beach scene. A beach scene might seem simple to you and I when it comes to merging, but I've had a lot of problems with software (Capture One, Lightroom) being able to do it correctly - and that was with 3 images, not 2. This left me with mixed expectations: would it be simpler to get right with only 2 images or would I get creations that looked like experiments from a lab? The 2 images I'm using for this experiment are:


There's a good amount of overlap here in the clouds, water and land. As humans, we can see roughly where the photos overlap (by a significant amount) and that a merge should be possible. Lets see what happens when I try to merge them:


Capture One (15.0.0.94):
"Capture One was unable to create a Panorama stitch preview."


Lightroom (13.2):
"Not enough matching photos for merging."


PtGui (13.beta11):
"PTGui has analyzed your images but was not able to match all of them."


hugin (2024.0.1):


This left me stunned. hugin is available for free for download from sourceforge yet its panorama image processing algorithms could do what the commercial ones could not. After creating the panorama, saving it as a TIFF and importing into Lightroom for some colour adjustments:


Now that I look, I can see some places where these two images are not perfectly aligned in time - this is just the first set and I can look further to see if I've got some better matches. It might be possible to coerce PTGui into working but since I've got working output from hugin, why would I waste time doing PTGui's work for it?

Where can you get hugin? https://hugin.sourceforge.io/

[kers]

This example is always difficult for stiching. The water moves - the sky has no straight forward points and the coast is too far in the corner; leaving the sandy coast for stitching. Hugin did not get the horizon straight. How easy is that to accomplish?
As a ptgui user I know that in these cases sometimes it works and a second time not; and then you have to add a few points to get it working. You can get the horizon straight in ptGui just by adding two points on the water horizon.
So no big deal unless the software does not have an alternative way to get it stitched and just says " bad luck".
It is good that Hugin is free to use and does a great job.

[dreed]

This example is always difficult for stiching. The water moves - the sky has no straight forward points and the coast is too far in the corner; leaving the sandy coast for stitching. Hugin did not get the horizon straight. How easy is that to accomplish?

It is possible to add control points in hugin, just like you do with PTGui. Exactly the same interface. A tip panel from hugin tells me:

If you prefer to use an alternative control point detector to Hugin's built-in CPFind, settings are provided in Preferences -> Control Point Detectors.  However you will still have to install those Control Point Detectors separately if you haven't already done so.