If you want to post your images, I’d be happy to play with them, though I am certainly no master. I have been playing a lot with hugin lately and the little changes in settings do make a huge difference.
The +/-2 I don’t think should make a hugs difference, but hard to say without seeing the images. You can always assign control points manually, but I don’t think that should be at all necessary for stacking images.
@paperdigits - I did a bit more testing and found my OOC JPEGs (smaller size) blend fine with your settings, despite the +/-2 stop brackets, while the (80Mbyte) 16-bit processed TIFFs show the problem.
Is there any reason to use the ‘exposure fused from any arrangement’ setting in this context, rather than ‘Exposure fused from stacks’? According to the hugin documentation the former first attempts to do a panorama stitch on images of similar exposure. This seems to require some automatic sorting of the images into exposure stacks. This mostly seems redundant in this case and perhaps less robust.
If.you have settings that are producing output you’re satisfied with, by all means use those. I tried with the sample.images here and didn’t see a difference between the two outputs.
My Debian install doesn’t have those.
Maybe its only in debian stable?
@houz - Only some Debian architectures have the mp versions. In particular not in the i386 packages. Still showing >100% CPU utilisation running Enfuse inside Hugin. Although Nona stitcher seems to be the heaviest user.
Debian Jessie has an enfuse-mp in the enfuse package, while Stretch only has an enfuse that was built with OpenMP enabled, so it’s basically enfuse-mp (now by default).
HTH
Flössie
Ah, that would explain it as I always run Sid. I am too dense to remember the other names. 
I just got the 404 also. I’ll look into it shortly. Thank you!
Fixed it last night - should be good now!
Select the Optimizer tab.
Nice walk-through but I haven’t got an “Optimizer” tab. In the “View” menu, I see one but it is disabled (same for “Exposure”). Am I missing something? If I skip this step, the final images don’t see to be “corrected”. Using Hugin 2019.0.0.a369cbe55179.
Are you using the “Expert” view?
Yes I am.
Maybe it has gone away and we need to update this tutorial!
It is still there but disabled, so I assume that somewhere Hugin thinks that I don’t need it.
I’ll try to have a look today.
I am using Hugin for the first time and followed the above step-by-step instructions (thanks for putting this together!). However, when I got to this step “Select Optimize now! and wait for the software to finish the calculations” I got an error message that says:
“There are no control points in the current configuration for the optimizer. Please add control points before running the optimizer. Optimization canceled.”
I’m not sure how to proceed. Any help would be appreciated.