Hugin Preferences

Panotools

By default, hugin uses the internal nona stitcher. Here you can enter an alternative stitching engine such as PTStitcher or PTmender.

Panotools preferences tab

Assistant

The Hugin Assistant tab automates the entire panorama creation process, these settings allow you to customise the assistant.

Image loading

Select Automatically align images after loading to run the second Align... step immediately after loading the images.

Auto align

Auto align uses autopano-sift or autopano to generate control points between pairs of images, set Number of Ctrl Points per overlap to control the number of control points. Note that although most pictures can be stitched with just three or four control points, automatically generated points tend not to be very evenly distributed, so this number should be set to ten or more

The size of the output Panorama Image Size is usually set in the Hugin Stitcher tab where it is also possible to Calculate Optimal Size based on the sizes of the input images. The Auto align process does something similar, though here you can set a smaller output as a percentage. Generally setting a percentage of 70% leads to no great loss of quality due to the way a camera CCD samples data.

Create

After stitching you can open the final image in an external program, this could be an image editor such as the Gimp or an interactive panorama viewer such as panoglview.

Finetune

Finetune preferences tab

hugin helps position control points to within a fraction of a pixel distance automatically:

• When auto fine-tune is selected in the hugin Control Points tab while picking control points.
• When clicking Fine-tune in the hugin Control Points tab
• When picking Fine-tune all Points in the hugin Main window Edit menu.

Basic settings

• Patch width, the size of the square of pixels taken from the left photo to match with the right photo when picking control points, reduce if this is taking a long time on your system.
• Search area width, the percentage area of the right photo that is searched when picking control points, reduce if this is taking a long time on your system.
• Local search area width, the region of the right photo searched when you click Fine-tune in the hugin Control Points tab or Fine-tune all Points in the hugin Main window Edit menu.
• Correlation Threshold. For each Fine-tune, hugin calculates the quality of the control points match, raise this threshold to reject dubious matches.
• Peak Curvature Threshold, TODO, what's this?

Rotation search

Enable this if your photos:

• have a very wide angle Field of View or fisheye Projection.
• are tilted up or down, control points near the zenith or nadir may need to have full 360 degree rotation search

Misc

Misc preferences tab

Resource usage

To speed things up hugin keeps a copy in memory of as many input photos as possible. With very large projects, this would use all your system memory, so set Image cache memory to a value below your available free RAM. The default of 200MB should be ok for a system with 512MB of RAM.

The hugin Preview window and nona are multi-threaded so can use more than one CPU/core if required. Set Number of CPUs to how many CPUs you wish to use when rendering with these tools.

User interface

Usually, hugin will use the current locale to determine the language of buttons, menus etc... Set the Language if you need to switch languages temporarily or if you are using a platform such as Windows95 that doesn't support localised software. hugin won't change language immediately, you will need to stop and restart it.

Optimize and stitch only images selected in preview window allows you to work on just a few of the images in the current project rather than all of them. Use the buttons along the top of the Hugin Preview window to enable and disable source photos. When optimising with the Hugin Optimizer tab or stitching with the Hugin Stitcher tab, all the hidden images will be ignored.

HDR and 16bit display mode

hugin supports both HDR and 16bit imaging. These image formats contain a lot more brightness and colour information than can be displayed on a standard computer monitor, so hugin only shows a rough representation of these pictures.

16bit data can have linear or corrected gamma. Linear images appear very dark on many monitors, so set the range to fixed and the mapping to gamma 2.2.

For HDR data, try setting the range to auto and the mapping to logarithmic.

Changes to the HDR and 16bit display mode require restarting hugin to take effect.

File options

Some hugin actions generate large temporary files, change the Tempdir to specify an alternative location for writing these files. One reason for setting this independently from the operating system would be to use a RAM disk to speed up stitching.

Preview

TODO

Autopano

TODO

Autopano preferences tab

Enblend

Enblend preferences tab

In the final stitching process nona reprojects and distorts images to fit, enblend takes these images as individual TIFF files and merges them using sophisticated seam positioning and blending into a single finished TIFF file.

The Use alternative Enblend program option allows you to use other tools with a similar interface such as smartblend or enblend-mask.

enblend supports a range of Additional arguments, for example you may want to set:

• -a Pre-assemble non-overlapping images to speed up blending.
• -l number Number of levels to use (1 to 29), larger numbers result in wider seams.
• -z Use LZW compression. The TIFF file format has a 2GiB limit (or 4GiB or 8GiB, depending on who you ask) so you will find this useful for large panoramas.
• -b kilobytes Image cache block size (default=2MiB)
• -c Use CIECAM02 to blend colors
• -m megabytes Use this much memory before going to disk (default=1GiB). Increase if you have a lot of memory on your system.
• --fine-mask Enables detailed mask generation.
• --no-optimize Turn off mask optimization.

Often you will want to keep the intermediate TIFF files created by nona in order to edit masks or for manual blending, otherwise Delete remapped tiff files or your disk will fill up with temporary data.

Cropped TIFF files are smaller and more efficient because unused parts of the image are not stored in the file. You should always Use cropped TIFF files unless you need to open them in an image editor without Cropped TIFF support.