The Grumpy Editor’s hugin experience

“More complex changes will require falling back to tools like
the GIMP, krita, or cinepaint. Anybody who has tried to join
together two or more independent images in those tools will have
discovered, however, that certain manipulations fall into a class
of their own. For that kind of work, hugin would appear to be the
only choice. Your editor has long intended to play with hugin; the
threat of having some real work to do finally provided the
necessary motivation.

“The problem with just gluing two images together is simple to
understand: lenses distort. Even the best lens will transform light
differently toward the edges of the image than it does in the
middle. Multiple images also suffer from parallax problems, even if
the camera is mounted on a tripod. The result is that two
overlapping images will not normally join together in a
straightforward way – the pieces simply do not fit. Resolving this
problem requires distorting the images in fairly tricky ways. The
key to the value of a tool like hugin is not in putting images
together; it is, instead, in the process of stretching and
remapping those images (along with some other details like exposure
matching) so that they can be put together. As an added bonus, the
ability to correct lens distortion makes some other interesting
applications possible.”

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