Tabs

Although there are many other uses, hugin is primarily a tool for assembling multiple photos and creating a 'seamless' panorama.

This process is completely automatic if you use the hugin Assistant tab, but hugin also allows full manual control of every stage. So hugin divides up the various stages and presents them as tabs in the main window. These tabs are roughly in the order of panorama creation from left to right, though in practice fine-tuning a project can involve some jumping around between tabs.

This is a quick overview of this tab system, it isn't a step by step tutorial, you can find these on the hugin website.

Assistant

The hugin Assistant tab is the fully automatic part of hugin, here you can load images, align them and stitch them into a panorama without having to use any of the other tabs.

Alternatively, you can use this Assistant as the first step in creating a project that will involve the use some or all of the other tabs:

Images

In the hugin Images tab you can add or remove photos to and from your project. The table in the middle also shows the positions in the final scene for each the images, these positions are actually angles for roll, pitch and yaw.

Although you could enter these positions manually here, you are more likely to create control points in the hugin Control Points tab and then use the optimiser in the hugin Optimizer tab to position your images for you.

Camera and Lens

Photos have properties that need to be known in order to assemble them seamlessly, notably geometric properties such as field of view or barrel distortion, plus photometric properties such as vignetting or exposure.

Again, although you could enter parameters for these properties here in the hugin Camera and Lens tab; hugin can estimate the field of view from data stored in the photo by the camera, it can also use the optimisers in the hugin Optimizer tab to calculate the geometric distortion, and in the hugin Exposure tab to calculate photometric corrections.

Crop

Often photos contain parts that you don't want to be used. Typically fisheye Projection images have a circular area in the middle with a useless black area outside. Scanned images have edges that need to be cropped away.

The hugin Crop tab allows you to apply simple masks to ignore these areas from your photos.

Control Points

hugin stitches panoramas by matching identical features in different photos, these features are defined by pairs of control points. The hugin Control Points tab shows two photos at a time and allows you to manually create and edit any pair of control points.

In addition to the Control Points tab the hugin Control Points table is used to manage pairs of control points.

control points can be created automatically in the Align section of the hugin Assistant tab or with the Feature Matching section of the hugin Images tab.

Optimizer

hugin uses a photo alignment scheme where it adjusts image orientation and lens settings of source photos until the control points line-up, this process is called optimisation and the hugin Optimizer tab is where it is controlled. You actually create individual control points in the hugin Control Points tab, and manage them in the hugin Images tab and hugin Control Points table.

Exposure

Photos in a project can have differences in exposure or white balance, either because of natural changes in lighting or from settings in the camera itself.

The hugin Exposure tab corrects these photometric variations by looking at pairs of overlapping photos and modelling a system of camera response curve, exposure, white balance and vignetting that fits the photos.

So for this to work, the photos in the project have to be already aligned. Align photos by managing control points in the hugin Control Points tab and optimising geometric image parameters in the hugin Optimizer tab.

Stitcher

The end result of a hugin project is an image file containing a panorama. The final hugin Stitcher tab is where size and quality are set and where this output file is created.

Menus

File

New, discard the current project and start a new empty project.
Open an existing hugin, PTGUI, PTAssembler, autopano or autopano-sift project file.
Save the current project as a hugin pto file.
Save as a pto file with a different name.
Write PTStitcher script, saves a simplified project file suitable for batch stitching with PTStitcher, nona or PTmender. Note that nona can stitch a hugin project file directly, so this step is unnecessary when using nona.

Send to batch, adds the current project to the Hugin Batch Stitcher stitching queue.

Run PTBatcher, launches the Hugin Batch Stitcher GUI queue manager, note that the queue won't be processed unless this queue manager is running.

Apply Template, assigns parameters from an existing pto project to the current set of photos. Only position and lens parameters are transferred, control points are ignored.

Preferences opens the hugin Preferences window.

Quit hugin.

Edit

Undo, undoes the most recent change to the current project.
Redo, redoes an undo.

Fine-tune all Points does the same as Fine-tune in the hugin Control Points tab except that all control points in the project are adjusted. Fine tune settings are set in the hugin Preferences.

Optimize, re-optimises the current project. This has exactly the same effect as clicking Optimize Now! in the hugin Optimizer tab.
Add Image to the current project.