Hugin 2009.2.0

Hugin-2009.2.0 release notes

Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more.
Changes since 0.8.0

The last release in July 2009 introduced several major new features, but took a long time to arrive. This release follows quickly with the intention of tracking development better with more frequent releases, even so we still have some great new features and smaller improvements:
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.
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

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'.

For users compiling from source: note that the minimum version of wxWidgets supported is now 2.7.0, libpano13 needs to be at least 2.9.14, and that Hugin now requires GLEW the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library, freeglut the OpenGL utility toolkit, and libGLU the OpenGL utility library.

Support for the legacy libpano12 library has been discontinued.

See the the README and INSTALL_cmake files for more information.

Thanks to all the contributors to this release and members of the hugin-ptx mailing list, too many to mention here.

Hugin can be found at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/.

Hugin sourcecode can be downloaded from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/.