Hugin is another panorama software. The Open Source tool can be seen as the complex brother of Autostitch. Its functionality and options are very extensive which might keep inexperienced users away. Experienced users on the other hand have a software at hand that creates professional panoramas.

The panorama creation should begin with the creation of the photos as it is essential to cover all of the region that should be seen in the panorama. It is usually suggested to overlap 20% to 30% between shots.

Hugin works with images taken from any orientation and available Exif information are automatically taken into account when loading photos. It is also a good idea to specify a so called anchor image. All other photos will be moved around to match the position of that photo then in the creation of the panorama.

Control points are used in the program to connect images with each other to aid the program in aligning the photos correctly. It is then time to run the optimizer and various additional tweaks to create the panorama.

The developer’s have created several tutorials on their website that aid new users. Available tutorials include a general introduction, creating a panorama from two or multiple photos, from photos with different orientations and advanced ones about perspective corrections or stitching auto-exposed panoramas.

The panorama software Hugin can be downloaded from the Sourceforge project page. The software is available for download for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh computer systems.

You simply choose the pictures from your hard drive and Autostitcher generates the new panoramic image. It is possible to change the settings before you load the images. You could raise the output quality of the panoramic image, select an output size or use the auto crop and auto straighten settings. The results with the default settings look fine most of the time though. You should be aware that only visible parts can be joined. This means that some spaces on the final image could be black because Autostitcher did not find information about that part in any of the images that you loaded.

Autostitch offers some test images that can be used to see how it works out. Just take a look below to see the process. Oh, and don’t let the “demo version” confuse you. The program is free to use for non-commercial use and the demo will only expire if a new version becomes available. Just download the new version and use that from now on.