Creating panorama photos under linux

This year I got a new hobby which is photography. As an amateur photographer I wanted to start creating also some panoramas. As the camera does not do that by itself I took a series of pictures of the subject (in my example the city of Florence, Italy).

What I did when taking the photos is simple: I took the shots overlapping the next picture somewhere between 25 to 50 percents to the previous one, always looking carefully through the visor to get a good portion of the subject that it is already contained in the previous shot. Also I tried to keep the camera straight while rotating for the next pictures.

When done, I went to my computer, copied the series of images I took and looked for a way to stitch them together.

As a Linux user who never tried to create panoramas, I googled for the simplest software solution available and installed Hugin Panorama Photo Stitcher - an open source project hosted on sourceforge.net. It was available directly from the repositories for my linux distribution so I installed it and it immediately appeared under the Graphics menu.

• I started it and it presented me with a screen having active a button which says: Load Images…
• I selected the folder and then the pictures using Ctrl+A to select them all.
• After selecting and clicking Open - the program presented me a screen to select the focal length. I looked up for it on the camera and also on internet to be able to give the right answer. But some other time I simply clicked Cancel and it selected some values automatically, I am not sure if it was from the EXIF data or not. Being eager to see some immediate results I first tried the program and then read the manual.
• Next step, the Align… button became active and I clicked it. Some screen calculating the points where images overlap appeared and it did its job for a while which can be longer or shorter, depending on the computer power and pictures size.
• At the end, the Create panorama… button became active. Clicking it presented me with a screen to select a folder to create panorama in and to select a filename. As I wanted to keep the highest quality possible I gave a name together with the extension .TIFF as it has high fidelity comparing to JPEG for instance. So, entered the name.tiff and clicked ok.
• After it finished, I saved the project in case I needed it later and then went to the folder to see the result. And it looked quite good. I only cropped the image in GIMP to eliminate parts I did not wanted.

Here is a link to the panorama I mentioned above.

Hugin offers a lot more than the simple procedure I described above. It is a complex tool, I’d say for both professionals and amateur photographers in need of an open source application for creating panoramas. But wait, there is more, it is available for all major platforms: Windows, Linux and Mac. Documentation is located here…

Have fun and if you find it useful, please drop a note describing your experience.

~cd

Written by cdriga on December 11th, 2009 with no comments.
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