This is the Hugin configuration and steps I usually follow when combining bracketed shots…
It is better to start from images that have already been corrected for barrel distortion, to improve the matching of control points at the edges of the frames.
First of all, I set the interface in “Expert” mode to have full control over the parameters.
Then I load the images, I choose “Align_image_stack linear” as the algorithm to create control points, set the “geometric” optimisation to “Custom parameters” and the “photometric” one to “Low dynamic range”:
Next I click on the “Create control points” button and then move to the “Optimiser” tab.
Here, I select the Roll, horizontal (TrX) and vertical (TrY) camera translations as the only parameters to optimise (because one generally only translates or rotates the camera when shooting handheld a distant subject). Then I click on “Optimise now!” and let the software do its magic:
Finally, in the “Stitcher” tab I click in sequence on “Calculate field of view”, “Calculate optimal size” and “Fit crop to images”. Then I select the outputs like in the screenshot below, to have the maximum number of post-processing options:
- the output of enfuse (“Exposure fused from any arrangement”)
- the HDR output in EXR format
- the individual images after remapping and without any exposure correction, if I want to do some manual exposure blending via luminosity masks in GIMP or PhotoFlow (“No exposure correction, low dynamic range”)
And finally I hit the “Stitch!” button:
Hope this helps others to start using the excellent hugin/enfuse combination for pseudo-HDR processing!