Software Spotlight: Hugin

Fish-eye sky panorama stitched together using Hugin

The image above is a composite image, made from 40 photos I took this weekend. I stitched them together using the open source software, Hugin.

Hugin is a brilliant piece of software. I went and sat in a park and took 40 photos of my surroundings. I didn’t need any special equipment: no tripod or special lens, just my 7.1 megapixel camera which I bought quite a few years ago now.

In Hugin, I selected the photos which I wanted to combine into a panorama, and it automatically analysed them to try to fit them together. It did a pretty good job, but couldn’t work things out completely. It told me which sets of photos weren’t yet connected to other sets of photos, and let me create “control points” between photos–that is, points which I could identify as being the same in two different photos.

Once I’d given Hugin some extra control points and let it align the photos from that data, all I had to do was select the output settings and wait for Hugin to blend the photos together. I’m very pleased with the result! As you might imagine, I have a much higher quality version than the one above. I think I will make it into a poster.