Hugin

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffNovember 7, 2012Hugin is a panoramic photo tool from Ippei UKAI. It's a large, flexible, and capable application that is based on the same open-source code as many expensive pro-level tools, but Hugin is freeware. It takes your digital snapshots or other series of similar images and stitches them together to form a single, seamless panoramic image. Unlike many other tools, it can consider your camera model and the shape of its lens in creating panoramas, which helps reduce image distortion. Despite its size and capability, Hugin is also portable.If you don't have a series of images suitable for creating a panorama, get out your camera and shoot four images all around you; Hugin will make good use of them. The program's tabbed interface starts with the wizard-like Assistant and progresses through Images, Camera and Lens, Crop, Mask, Control Points, Optimizer, Exposure, and Stitcher. We added some images from our library, a process that lets you load saved data on your camera's lens and helps Hugin automatically configure its panoramic effects. With our images loaded into the assistant queue, we began walking through the various steps involved in selecting, aligning, and stitching together images and rendering them as a single exposure. Make no mistake: Hugin is an extremely capable tool, with commensurate complexities, but never did we feel overwhelmed by its options or processes. We created a small but satisfactory panoramic image that opened in Windows Photo Viewer when we clicked it. It's easy to see how, with more input, it's possible to create large, detailed panoramic images that look like they were shot with special lenses and equipment instead of a pocket-size digital camera or even a cellphone.As we noted, Hugin is a large package for freeware, and it seems more than capable of handling professional demands as well as putting a top-quality photographic tool in the average user's hands. We especially like the way you can load and save data on multiple lenses and apply them to a single project. Before you start, gather data on your lenses from manuals or online; Hugin can use it to improve its results.