Hugin panorama: change photo stacking order

[Captain Chaos]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to find out how I can change the stacking order of the
photos when Hugin is stitching a panorama together. I'm using version
0.8.0 on Ubuntu 9.04, by the way.

Let me explain: I have a bunch of photos I took of Manhattan, from the
New Jersey side of the Hudson, and I want to make a panorama of them.
Unfortunately, the second photo from the left (which has the Empire
State building on it), is out of focus. Hugin still manages to produce
a very good panorama, but the entire section where the Empire State
building is is out of focus. You can see it here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/captainchaos/4244189041/

Now, the third photo from the left also has the Empire State building,
and it is in focus. However, because photo 2 overlaps photo 3, and
Hugin stacks photo 2 above photo 3, the portion of photo 3 which has
the Empire State building and is in focus is hidden behind photo 2.

My question is, is there a way to influence the stacking order of the
photos? I want photo 2 to be behind *all* the other photos, so that as
small a portion of the panorama as possible is out of focus. How can I
do that? Are there other ways I can achieve the same effect?

I hope my explanation is clear enough, and that someone here can help
me. Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,
Pepijn Schmitz

[Bruno Postle]

On Mon 04-Jan-2010 at 11:16 -0800, Captain Chaos wrote:
>
>My question is, is there a way to influence the stacking order of the
>photos? I want photo 2 to be behind *all* the other photos, so that as
>small a portion of the panorama as possible is out of focus. How can I
>do that? Are there other ways I can achieve the same effect?

You can influence the stacking order by changing the order of
photos, photo 0 is stitched first, so you may find it useful to put
the blurred photo last.

I would try stitching the blurred photo separately, in the preview
you can turn individual photos on and off, so stitch the panorama
without the blurred photo and then with only the blurred photo.
Load these two images as layers in an image editor and blend them
with the eraser tool.

Another approach would be to switch the blender from 'enblend' to
'enfuse', this deals better with out of focus photos. You need to
edit the .pto file in a text editor and change the #hugin_blender
option, reopen in Hugin and stitch.

--
Bruno

[Dale Beams]

Actually this is a request of mine as well.  Every now and then I'll get a out of focus photo, or a set of photos where I've bumped my tri-pod and introduced parallax.  While parallax is not negotiable, often I see where I could drop a photo below another and the correction would be made because the one photo has less parallax than the other one.  Another example would be color, white noise, brightness.  By setting stack order I could get better results.  Perhaps a way to set stack order by setting an number to each photo so that on could switch photos in stack order for a number of sets.

Dale


> Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 20:58:33 +0000
> From: br...@postle.net
> To: hugi...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: [hugin-ptx] Hugin panorama: change photo stacking order

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[voschix]

My way to deal with this is to use hugin's Crop tool on the out-of-
focus picture so that it just covers the gap between the "good"
pictures.

Volker

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[dex Otaku]

Captain Chaos wrote:

> My question is, is there a way to influence the stacking order of the
> photos? I want photo 2 to be behind *all* the other photos, so that as
> small a portion of the panorama as possible is out of focus. How can I
> do that? Are there other ways I can achieve the same effect?

I use the same methods as the replies above - a combination of
cropping and altering image order - not exactly for out-of-focus shots
but for the times when image distortion near the edges tends to make
optimisation difficult, resulting in stitching artifacts.

What I've been thinking about for the past couple of years is that the
interface could do with some tweaks to help in this process:

1. image re-ordering is excruciatingly slow, even on a fast machine,
and can only be done with one image at a time. With multi-row panos
this can make shifting a whole row or column take a long time of
click..wait..click..wait etc. I do understand that reordering the
images means altering all the CP tables in the process, which is the
part that takes the time .. perhaps, though, it might be possible to
add a way to select multiple images and shift them all as a block, or
to suspend the table-shifting until after the order has been
rearranged? In some cases I've prerendered all the images uncropped
and rendered the final pano with something like enblend-gui [where
changing the order is instantaneous] because it actually takes less
time to do than simply reordering the images in Hugin.

2. It may be asking a lot in terms of programming, but it would be
really REALLY useful to have crop masks that aren't simply rectangles,
either free-drawn or polygonal.

D