Hugin Changelog

What's new in Hugin 2018.0.0 Beta 1

Dec 11, 2017

Several improvements for optimizer tabs (mark deselected images, allow changing optimizer variables for all selected images at once, option to ignore line cp)
hugin_stacker: New tool to stack overlapping images.
Hugin: Added option to disable auto-rotation of images in control point and mask editor.
Nona, verdandi and hugin_stacker can now write BigTIFF images (for files >4 GB).
Added expression parser to GUI: This allows to manipulate several image variables at once. (This is the same as running pto_var --set from the command line.)
Add user-defined assistant and expose it in the GUI. It allows to set up different assistant stategies without the need to recompiling. Provide also some examples (scanned images, multi-row panoramas with orphaned images, single-shot panorama cameras).

New in Hugin 2017.0.0 (Dec 11, 2017)

New in Hugin 2016.2.0 RC 1 (Jul 10, 2016)

New in Hugin 2014.0.0 (Oct 22, 2014)

New in Hugin 2014.0.0 RC 4 (Jun 7, 2014)

New in Hugin 2014.0.0 RC 2 (Apr 30, 2014)

New in Hugin 2013.0.0 (Nov 4, 2013)

New in Hugin 2013.0.0 RC 1 (Jun 29, 2013)

New in Hugin 2012.0.0 (Jan 8, 2013)

New in Hugin 2012.0.0 RC 1 (Sep 25, 2012)

New in Hugin 2011.2.0 (Oct 3, 2011)

New in Hugin 2011.0.0 (Jun 3, 2011)

New in Hugin 2010.2.0 (Oct 20, 2010)

Layout mode:
The Hugin Fast Preview window visualises your panorama and lets you
change the project by dragging and clicking. This release introduces
an extra mode for this preview that shows the entire project as a
diagram with colour-coded lines connecting each of the photographs.
Now with a glance you can see where the project is ok and where
there are problems if it isn't quite right. Just click on any
connection and Hugin jumps to the Control Points tab to edit that
pair of photos.
Masking:
Hugin uses multiresolution seam blending to join photos invisibly by
smoothing colours and brightness. Controlling the location of this
seam is now much easier with the new Mask tab, which instead of
requiring you to place the seam itself, lets you just indicate the
areas of photos that you do and don't want to be part of the
finished panorama - The seam itself then gets placed intelligently
using the remaining overlapping areas.
Masks can be saved and reused in new projects, so objects that
appear again and again like tripod heads can be easily excluded.
Mosaics:
For a stitched panorama you shoot photos in different directions but
from a single location, Hugin will happily assemble these into a
complete scene. Now Hugin has an alternative mosaic mode ‚Äî You can
take photos of a planar object such as a floor, painting, or mural
from any position, direction or angle, and Hugin will stitch them
seamlessly just as it does with a normal panorama.
Linked bracketing:
Hugin allows you to shoot exposure bracketed photos and panoramas,
it will automatically combine them with exposure fusion or HDR
merging into a single image that has the best areas of each photo in
the stack. Hugin uses the same alignment process as with panoramas
so even hand-held bracketing works perfectly.
Photographers who use quality tripods can now skip this alignment
stage by telling Hugin that photos in a bracketed stack are linked
and share the same view.
Control point detector modes:
Hugin uses plugin tools called control point detectors to
automatically match features between photos. Previous versions of
Hugin relied on the detector entirely, but now Hugin can make
intelligent detector choices based on knowledge of the panorama.
So Hugin can now match the photos in a multi-row panorama more
efficiently and with less error by breaking the job into separate
tasks, panoramas consisting of bracketed stacks can be automatically
identified and Hugin will switch to using appropriate matching
tools.
Another new feature is that panoramas can be approximately aligned
by dragging the photos around in the preview or using a template,
the control point detector can then be asked to only check
overlapping pairs of photos instead of all possible combinations of
photos ‚Äî This speeds things up and reduces the chances of false
matches.
New lens types:
Hugin supports photos taken with a wide range of 'normal' and
fisheye lenses, and can fine-tune for variation of distortion from
these standard types. With this release support has been added for
orthographic, stereographic and equisolid lenses.
Migration to Mercurial:
Development of Hugin sourcecode has switched from Subversion to
Mercurial to better support parallel development and to reduce
dependency on Sourceforge infrastructure.
Languages:
Most of the translations have been updated for this release.
Other improvements:
This release has the usual bugfixes, adds minor features, and
provides some more command-line tools for scripting panorama
projects.

New in Hugin 2010.0 (Mar 31, 2010)

Usability
The Hugin Fast Preview window is where you see a rough preview of the final panorama and can edit it with a selection of tools — For example, one of several 'modes' is Drag for moving photos around the canvas, there are also single click 'actions' to do things like reset the exposure or center the view.
Now these tools have been overhauled to make them easier to find, to get a bigger panorama canvas, and to create space for new features in the pipeline such as the upcoming Layout mode. Switching 'modes' is more intuitive, with a tab for each that shows just the 'actions' relevant to that mode, the key enables full-screen viewing of the preview.
There are other usability-related changes — the Hugin main window can also be viewed full-screen with ; more photo EXIF metadata is displayed in the Images tab; a list of recent projects is available in the File menu; plus there has been a general clean-up of text in the GUI and many updates to the manual.
Autocrop
Hugin is great for stitching hand-held panoramas, but nobody can shoot in perfect straight lines, so these panoramas need careful cropping to produce a picture with 100% coverage. The Fast Preview window now has an Autocrop button that does all this for you automatically — Just click, and the crop rectangle will be resized to use the largest possible area covered by your photos.
Deghosting
One of the advanced Hugin features is to merge bracketed photos using exposure fusion or HDR merging - This is done automatically when stitching when bracketed sets are detected.
However, when people or objects move during a bracketed sequence, 'ghosts' appear in the result. So another Summer of Code project has now been integrated that both enables HDR deghosting in the GUI and provides an experimental deghosting_mask tool for exposure fusion deghosting with enfuse.
Languages
With the addition of a Finnish translation, the Hugin application is now internationalized for twenty-one languages, most of the translations have been updated for this release.
Other improvements
This release also has the usual incremental improvements: The default size of the image cache has increased in line with modern computers, so existing Hugin users may want to check or reset their Preferences to suit; the About dialog has been extended to show a full list of Hugin contributors, and there have been many other fixes for minor bugs and annoyances.

New in Hugin 2009.4 (Dec 16, 2009)

Automatic lens calibration - Hugin is already a great tool for calibrating lenses; by stitching a panorama Hugin will automatically calculate barrel distortion, vignetting and angle of view for any lens. Plus there is everything a power user might want: different lenses can be calibrated in a single project, fisheyes and shift lenses pose no problems to the Hugin optimiser.
However, stitching a panorama is not the only way to calculate lens parameters; barrel distortion turns straight lines into curves, so figuring out how to straighten them again is enough to accurately calibrate a lens - All you need is an object with lots of straight-lines, such as a modern building, and one or more photographs of it.
This year Tim Nugent was employed by Google Summer of Code to add a new Hugin tool called calibrate_lens, this takes such photos as input and produces calibrated parameters as output. There isn't yet a graphical interface, and the command-line tool still requires work to produce output compatible with Hugin, but this release provides a base to build future tools.
Control point cleaning - Hugin aligns photos using a system of control points; these are features from the scene that appear in each pair of overlapping photos. Normally just a handful of features are needed to get a good result, but they do need to be identified - This can be done either by picking them in the Hugin Control Points tab or by using one of the automatic control point creator plugins such as autopano-sift-C or pan-o-matic.
These Control point creators are incredibly convenient, but still make mistakes that are obvious to the human eye. Hugin now filters automatically generated points to remove those that are statistically improbable. The same filter can be used to 'clean' an existing project on the Images tab, and is available as a new scriptable command-line tool called cpclean.
Languages - The Hugin application is translated into twenty languages, most of these translations have been updated for this release.
Other improvements - This release also has the usual incremental improvements: building on Windows, Linux and OS X is now easier, some crashes in obscure situations have been fixed, more useful photo EXIF metadata is shown in the Images tab, the manual has been updated to document current features and now displays in your default system web-browser, a bug where upside down crop rectangles confused the stitcher is fixed, and an annoyance where control point settings were not persistent between sessions is gone.
Control point generators - Hugin doesn't yet ship with a 'Patent Free' control point generator. So you either need to pick control points manually - Not as difficult as it sounds - or install and configure one of the following control-point generators as 'plug-ins':
autopano-sift-C
panomatic
match-n-shift
Autopano-SIFT
Autopano freeware version

New in Hugin 2009.2 (Nov 18, 2009)

Hardware accelerated stitching:
Hugin ships with nona for reprojecting and distorting photos. Nona will use multiple processors in parallel on a 'multi-core' system, but now it can use the GPU of your graphics hardware instead - Potentially many times faster and freeing your computer for other tasks. This GPU accelerated stitching is still experimental and requires a modern graphics card.
Control point creator presets:
Hugin aligns images by matching features, known as 'control points'. These control points can be created manually in the Hugin Control Points tab or automatically by a 'control point creator'. Due to patent encumbrances in the USA, Hugin doesn't ship with an internal control point creator, but makes it possible to use an external tool such as Autopano-SIFT-C or Pan-o-Matic as a 'plug-in'.
Hugin now comes pre-configured with typical settings for common plug-ins and lets you add your own. Switching between tools is now simple - Even allowing you to match different parts of a single project with different plug-ins.
Exposure layer fusion:
Hugin uses two related tools for joining reprojected photos together. Usually any 'bracketed stacks' are first combined with enfuse into a single image using the best exposed bits from each, then these 'exposure fused' images are 'seam blended' with enblend into the final panorama.
This works very well, but what if your camera doesn't have a bracketing mode? In this case you have to take an entire panorama, change the EV setting, then take the panorama again, so there is no guarantee any of the shots will line up into 'stacks'. Hugin now has an extra stitching mode where photos with similar exposures are grouped and seam blended into 'layers' with enblend, then these layers are 'exposure fused' into a final panorama with enfuse.
Visual control points:
The last release introduced the Fast Preview window for manipulating the panorama visually in real-time - Coming soon to this window will be some great new features to help you manage every aspect of panorama creation.
This release has a taster of these new features, with a new mode to show control points in the Fast Preview window itself.
EXIF metadata display:
Photos produced by digital cameras contain useful hidden metadata such as: date taken, camera model, shutter speed, aperture and focal length. In the Images tab Hugin now displays some useful metadata for the currently selected photo.
Languages:
Most translations have been updated.
New version naming:
It is often noted that with version numbers like 0.8.0, Hugin looked like pre-release software - In reality Hugin is very usable for anyone, from holidaymakers just wanting to stitch a single panorama, to professional photographers and scientists needing a day-to-day workhorse.
So in practice, Hugin reached version one a long time ago. With this release we are switching to a date based system similar to many other Open Source software projects. This is the second stable release this year, so we are calling it 2009.2.0, the next stable release this year will also be even-numbered 2009.4.0 and so on. Snapshots of the development trunk would have odd-numbers, e.g. 2009.3.0.
Other improvements:
There are many more improvements to Hugin in this release: More options in the preferences, better error messages for when things do go wrong, fixes for lots of reported bugs, and better support for packagers on BSD, Linux, OS X and Windows.

New in Hugin 0.8.0 RC5 (Jul 8, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.8.0 RC4 (Jun 17, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.8.0 RC3 (Jun 6, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.8.0 RC2 (Jun 2, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.8.0 RC1 (May 8, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.8.0 Beta 3 (Mar 26, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.8.0 Beta 2 (Mar 10, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.8.0 Beta 1 (Feb 24, 2009)

New in Hugin 0.7.0 (Oct 7, 2008)

Online help
Hugin now has comprehensive help documentation for the
entire user interface, the manual now includes glossary
items explaining many panorama stitching and related
photography concepts.
Languages
New translations include Slovak, Korean, Bulgarian and
Spanish. This means that hugin is now usable with a total
of twenty languages.
New Assistant panel
Creating simple panoramas is much easier, hugin now starts
showing an Assistant with a simple 1-2-3 approach for
loading images, aligning and creating the final output.
The Assistant will estimate lens and camera parameters,
then pick a suitable output projection and size, advanced
options are still available for manual adjustment.
Photometric model
Previous versions of hugin and panotools had basic support
for correcting vignetting and exposure differences between
photos.
This has been completely overhauled, hugin now internally
uses the EMoR model for representing exposure
photometrically. This means that the camera response curve,
vignetting, colour balance and exposure can now be
optimised in much the same way as geometrical properties
such as position and lens distortion.
The result is that blending between photos is better than
ever before.
HDR
Previously hugin supported High Dynamic Range imaging
solely by allowing stitching of HDR floating-point TIFF
photos - These images themselves had to be created in
another tool.
Now, thanks to the internal photometric model, hugin can
now create HDR output from normal exposure bracketed
photos. The photos don't have to be perfectly-aligned,
they don't even need to be nearly-aligned or have
consistent exposure differences - The hugin optimiser will
sort all this stuff out, and the stitcher will create
OpenEXR or TIFF HDR output files for later tonemapping or
use as lightprobes.
Exposure blending
HDR and tonemapping isn't for everybody, enfuse introduced
exposure blending to the world, and hugin supports aligning
and fusing bracketed stacks of photos, perfectly, all as
part of the stitching process.
So now with hugin-0.7.0 and enblend-3.2 you can create
realistic, photographic panoramas that have no over-exposed
or under-exposed areas.
Makefile stitching
hugin-0.7.0 introduces a new stitching back-end: previously
the various stitching tools were executed directly by the
GUI, now all the commands required to generate the output
are written to a Makefile which is then processed
independently of hugin itself.
Aside from easier debugging and customisation; this
background stitching allows you to get on with creating a
new project while waiting for the previous job to finish -
Stitching can also be deferred or shifted to another
machine, even 'headless' servers can now be used.
Projections
Hugin has always had the ability to save panoramas using
simulated normal and fisheye lenses, or 360 degree
cylindrical and spherical projections.
Now a whole series of alternative cartographic mappings are
available, of particular interest are the 'conformal'
stereographic and Mercator projections which can be used to
show extremely large angles of view with no local
distortion.
Project templates
Hugin project files can now be used as templates for new
panorama projects. This is useful if you take a lot of
panoramas with exactly the same camera positions.
Other improvements
There's a whole lot of other new stuff in this release:
numbering in the control-point editor, straight-line
control-points, numeric transform, clicking to rotate the
preview, a straighten button, cropping of the output and
probably more.
Command-line tools
This release provides new command-line tools:
align_image_stack: align a nearly-aligned stack of photos
pto2mk: create a stitching Makefile from a pto project
vig_optimise: optimise photometric parameters
tca_correct: calculate lens chromatic aberration
hugin_hdrmerge: assemble a bracketed stack to HDR
matchpoint: classify control point features
Control point generators
Hugin doesn't yet ship with a 'Patent Free' control point
generator. So you either need to pick control points
manually - Not as difficult as it sounds - or install and
configure one of the following control-point generators as
'plug-ins', in no particular order:
autopano-sift-C
panomatic
Autopano-SIFT
Autopano freeware version
Upgrading
Upgrading from previous versions of hugin should be
seamless. If you do have problems with old settings, these
can be reset in the Preferences by clicking 'Load defaults'.

New in Hugin 0.7 RC 6 (Sep 15, 2008)

New in Hugin 0.7 RC 5+ (Sep 8, 2008)

New in Hugin 0.7 Beta 5 (Jul 25, 2008)