Hugin is an open-source panorama photo creation tool. It can put multiple photos together very easily and the end result is smooth and stunning!

Hugin uses the same open source library used by many other software including shareware like PTMac from Kekus Digital. Hugin is, however, free and you can start making panoramic photos without buying any expensive software or equipment. Unlike many similar software, Hugin considers the shapes of the lens and can adapt to the particular distortion profile of your camera.

For advanced users, hugin also has many features for making panoramas with special equipment, including two types of fisheye lenses and more.

WHAT’S NEW

Version 0.8:

• Fast Preview window

  A new Fast Preview window has been added, this uses OpenGL graphics acceleration to show changes as they happen. You can drag photos around the window and they will warp to their new positions in real-time. Everything else you need to turn, pan and crop your panorama can now be done interactively in the Fast Preview.

  This Fast Preview also now acts as a hub for working with a panorama project: the Identify mode lets you click on the overlap between two photos to bring up the Control Point editor for that pair of photos.

• Celeste sky identification

  Stitching makes use of static scenery such as buildings to match photos together, however objects that move cause misalignments, and clouds move enough to be a particular problem. To make better panoramas, Hugin has now been trained as a Support Vector Machine to ignore clouds when matching photos.

• New panorama projections

  Panoramas tend to have a very large field of view, and Hugin does a good job simulating virtual wide-angle lenses for output. But painters and artists can do better than photographers, often spanning scenes that look absurdly distorted when squeezed into photographic perspective. Influenced by these vedutismo artists, Hugin introduces some new projections for more elegant wide-angle perspectives: Pannini, Biplane and Triplane.

  In addition, Orthographic and Equisolid output have been added to Hugin’s already extensive set of azimuthal projections.

• Batch Processor

  Creating Hugin projects is now easier than ever, but actually stitching large panoramas slows your computer – Usually at the same time that you want to do something else. Now with the Hugin Batch Processor, stitching can be postponed until it is convenient for you.

  Projects can be added to the queue from Hugin itself, or directly by drag-and-drop from a file manager. In the Batch Processor you get an overview of progress where the projects can be easily rearranged, paused or canceled.

• Online help

  The manual has been updated to cover the new features and adds more glossary pages explaining panorama and photography related words.

• Languages

  Most translations have been updated, plus Hugin is now available in Slovenian and Chinese Traditional. The manual has been completely translated into Italian.

• Other improvements

  There are many more changes in this release, here are just some of them: a Reset… button in the Camera and Lens tab, better support for ’special’ characters in folder and file names, Align… now works properly when loading saved lens .ini files, hints added to Control Point tab pull-down lists, stitching now starts with a series of tests, gcc-4.4.0 support, better Makefile plugin support, man pages for command-line tools, new button icons throughout and a command-line version of Celeste

More information

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

Over at Instructables, user Banjomaster shows how to make a fisheye lens for his Nikon D90 for just $16, with the help of one of those wide-angle doorway peephole lenses.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.It looks like a pretty simple mod, both in materials required and construction method: It only needs a couple pieces of particle board, the aforementioned peephole lens, the spare lens shield that came with his camera, and of course some duct tape. The only possible caveat: The replacement wide-angle lens is significantly smaller than the camera’s lens, so there’s a circle around all of the shots. On the other hand, it’s sort of cool; it makes everything look like you shot it through a hotel door. Check it out, we’re sure it can be modified for other makes and models of DSLR. [Instructables]

(Via Gizmodo.)