Creating Seamless Panoramas

Most digital cameras bundle some kind of software to create panoramas; a collection of pictures stitched together to form a single, seamless picture.

I was quite disappointed with Canon’s “stitching” software (came bundled with my S50). The software simply pastes the pictures together, creating a very heavy and noticeable blur at the edges, in a lame attempt to hide the seams. Dissatisfied with this solution, I googled around a bit until I found Hugin, an excellent GUI for the Panorama Tools.

Hugin can stitch your pictures perfectly, even if you didn’t use a tripod or if took them at different camera tilt angles (a common situation if you’re holding the camera with your hands). Unlike most software in its category, it uses “control points” to “glue” the images together and compensate for the differences in tilt.

Hugin does not try to hide the seams that connect your pictures. To make a perfect panorama, you’ll also need Enblend, which takes care of making the seams in your panorama invisible.

The results are indeed impressive, and the seams are very hard to locate. I recently took some pictures of mountain bike trails in Ocala, Florida, and joined them using Hugin+enblend to create this panorama.

For further reading, try this page, which explains in detail how to use Hugin and Enblend to make create a panorama from a set of images.

Keywords: camera, panorama, hugin, pano-tools, enblend, autopano, picture, canon, stitch

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