Hi folks, what’s the best source to follow on Hugin news and updates?
For what I have found in the Internet, the progress of this project development is really slow, or it just seems so?
Since current version of Hugin from Ubuntu repos lacks stability and better interface, are there +/- equal or superior alternatives for Linux/Ubuntu?
I generally use @Dariusz_Duma’s excellent PPA to stay up-to-date. I don’t see Hugin in the list of packages but the back-end tools (i.e. PanoTools, Enblend, Enfuse) that it uses haven’t changed much. So, I am not too concerned about updating regularly.
You are correct, hugin doesn’t update often. I think it is pretty feature complete at this point.
I find it more important that enblend/enfuse is built with GPU and multi processor support turned on. Lots of distros have one but not the other.
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I agree they’re probably close to feature complete. Also, they at least have a yearly release I think, right?
I know @Morgan_Hardwood makes use of it for some awesome panos. Maybe he has some insight?
I think they released 3 times last year. Not sure they’ve had one this year.
Though commercial, if you’re serious about panoramas then Kolor’s Autopano is just the best tool for the job. Granted it has been a few years since I checked out the alternatives.
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Hugin is perhaps one of the more succesful open source projects I have encountered; apart of course from Linux itself 
Just felt the need to display some Hugin love 
Ok, so let me articulate the issue description.
I have to stitch a lot of panos.
Most of them are similar so I expect using the same settings for each image group, adjusting just yaw/pitch/rotate individually. Unfortunately current Hugin’s interface does not provide any settings template or one-click reset for blending. Moreover, no pitch/yaw/rotate sliders as well - every yaw/pitch/rotate adjustment needs careful typing of figures into boxes (Its the 21st century and even phones are capable of swiping.
As every iteration is time consuming, with many panoramas, I have to spend lots of time - hours for just 10-20 panos
As of today, are there better, or at least equal alternatives for Hugin that can be run under Ubuntu? I just need the same functions + settings template. No matter free or commercial.
Why enter the yaw/pitch by hand? Let hugin figure it out!
@mosaster I rarely do any stitching, so unfortunately, I could only offer advice on the first part of your question. I hope you find a solution .
@paperdigits Maybe the algorithms aren’t foolproof or @mosaster just wants to make a stylistic choice.
Instead of a thousand words here is a pano in two versions
a) with yaw/pitch/rotate set automatically
b) with yaw/pitch/rotate initially set automatically and further manually adjusted
Follow the river bank line - it must be as straight as possible. However, even getting automatic y/p/r takes about 10 more parameters to be set, like lens type, HFOV, etc,etc - with no template available when you make more than one panorama. 
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Thanks, mate I would have to as I want to produce more of great shots.
Look at my recent post here with panorama and you’ll see what is missing in there.
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Have you looked at the internals of the .pto file at all? There is a possibility you could make a template out of it, as I believe it is just a script.
@mosaster I can say three things about that:
- I use Hugin only for re-projecting single images, not for stitching, because after several attempts I found that to be far too slow and cumbersome. I’m not familiar with optimal solutions to using templates in Hugin. But I want to support floss software whenever I can, so the next time I do stitching I will give Hugin 2017.0 another shot - hopefully it has improved with age. I want to add that I do love the control point placer/magnifier in Hugin, it’s very well made and effective.
- Using templates generally requires that you use a precise pano head, typically a robotic one. You wrote, referring to your panoramas, that “most of them are similar”, so the question is what does “similar” mean. Generating new control points should lead to better results and should only take several seconds, so I do that every time despite using a precise pano head (“precise” is relative anyway). As for your yaw/pitch/roll question, are you asking about that for individual images, or for the whole pano? If for the latter, then Hugin has a fast OpenGL viewer/editor using which you can change yaw/pitch/roll numerically or just by click-dragging the preview with the mouse.
- The “other solution” I mentioned before runs just fine in Linux - I made sure of that by being actively involved in testing bug reporting for many years.
Having now seen your example pano I’m quite certain that templates won’t help you. A template’s job is to get the images in the correct positions so that the control point finder has a better starting point and easier job, or even skipping CPs altogether and just leaving it to the blender, but that requires both accurate hardware and a consistent setup. I doubt your setup is consistent - do you perfectly bubble-balance your head and use a click-stop ring even when shooting in the reeds by a lake?
The trick to balancing panos such as the one you showed is by making use of the fact that a vertical line drawn from a point above the water to its reflection in the water must be perfectly vertical. In this example I clicked on the tip of the roof on the right, and drew a line down to the same tip inverted in the water’s reflection. Ditto for the window in the middle, and the tower on the left. Three lines are enough, then just let Hugin optimize the pano using these new verticals.
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Thanks, Morgan, I absolutely agree with each statement of yours, but if you read my comments you’d find out that I’m not happy with Hugin because I cannot store settings. Save for the control points (of course they have to be generated each time), there are tons of other settings to be dialed manually each single batch Just to name a few: geometric, photometrics, exposure, projection, output, etc. Even though I don’t need to adjust them, but just add to the pipeline. Each single time I need check in different tabs, instead of storing all settings as a template.
This image is optimized, but got manual adjustment too - that’s why it looks better than the first one that I didn’t adjust.
pls refer to the post above
To learn how to take more control of hugin, check out: Panorama scripting in a nutshell - PanoTools.org Wiki. You can do much more in the command line and even more if you combine that with bash.
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Instead of a thousand words can you @mosaster send original photos or some others so we all can try to stitch them with Hugin. I hope that all can tell how they used Hugin . (sorry my bad english)
I think @afre is right, you could script the initial parameters you need and have it generate the PTO file, then open that file in hugin at whatever stage is necessary (if it is necessary at all).