Comments on: A Quick and Dirty Hugin Panoramic Stitcher Tutorial

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:42:47 +0000

Hi, Stacey,

1. Left and right.
2. If you’re using a zoom, make sure you set it to the length that you want to shoot it at. Usually, it’s the widest length.

Hope this helps.

By: Stacey Bindman

Stacey Bindman — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:00:31 +0000

Hello Bryan,I have a Panoramic Manfrotto head and would finally like to use it!
1. In your paragraph “Calibrate a Panoramic Tripod Head”, you said to “Put the second broom so it is hiding behind the first when you look through the viewfinder. Now rotate your tripod head” When you say rotate the tripod head, do you mean left or right, or up or down?

2. In the paragraph “Shooting Your Pictures”, you said to I: Check that your zoom is set to the correct focal length. How do I determine the correct focal length?

Thanking you in advance for your assistance,
(Mr.) Stacey Bindman, Montreal (Canada)

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:55:47 +0000

Patata – Thanks! I’m glad it helped you out. If there’s something more you don’t understand, let me know, I’m moving into my slower season, so I have a tiny touch of free time to come up with something.

By: patata

patata — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:16:58 +0000

Great tutorial. Thanks for it.
It has solved many of the doubts I had (still have any, )

By: DBL

DBL — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:20:26 +0000

This tutorial is not for the layman? You should have said that, up front. ‘Quick and dirty’ gives an entirely different impression. Anyway, I don’t want to beat this to death, either. If your tutorial is meant for people with already a certain level of expertise, then none of my previous criticisms apply — only the one about misleading people. I do appreciate that you have engaged with me and remained polite despite some pretty bold criticism.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:30:48 +0000

I don’t want to beat a dead horse on this, but this wasn’t written for the layman, it was written for Real Estate Agents that had a basic understanding of the concepts. I used to do Real Estate Photography and had questions about the process. Thus this article.

Thanks for the points and thanks for reading the tutorial.

By: DBL

DBL — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:28:25 +0000

Yeah I get it, if I think it can be written so much better, why don’t I write it myself. A very good point. But just so you know what I’m talking about, you have a full section entitled ‘The Downward Images for the 10.5 DX’ and the only way to figure out that this cypher means is to read back and find a parenthetical note that does not apply to everybody. Technical people just do this unconscious. ‘Oh yeah, the 10.5.’ The what? And what are ‘downward images’?

And this stuff is just totally bewildering: ‘In Hugin, you may notice on the Image tab a Feature Matching (Autopano). This feature uses the same. Read that again. The Same. And Again. The same SIFT technology that is used in Autostitch to find control points for use in making your image.’ You have to read that sentence structure about five times to figure out that you are using sentences in a non-standard way. And who are you speaking to here? Why are you so emphatic? Did I argue against you? Or have other panorama experts argued against you?

You see, you have written this subconsciously for people who already know exactly what you’re talking about. There are a lot more examples of why this tutorial is much more difficult to read than it needs to be.

However it is still probably the best one I’ve seen because the others are all so damn abysmal. That’s why you are getting thank yous to people to whom this is like water in the desert.

I just don’t understand why panorama people have so many difficulties imagining and writing toward a layman’s mindset — I guess they are just too deep in a very deep forest of references.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:08:59 +0000

DBL- Thanks, for the comments. I think that if you follow the steps here, you’ll end up successfully stitching an image. Back when I had first posted this several years ago as a static html page, I received many comments about how it helped Real Estate Photographers with creating VR Tours. I even had several, as in two, phone calls thanking me for the tutorial.

Stitching has come a long way since I first posted it, and I wrote it, basically, to help Real Estate Photographers that had a grasp on basic concept and not the layman.

Thanks, for the comments. It sounds like you have a process and a grasp on how you would like to write a tutorial. I encourage you to write one and post a link here, so others who find my tutorial complex will be able to easily find another source.

By: DBL

DBL — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:31:53 +0000

Okay maybe I was a little hard on this tutorial — clearly more of an effort has been made than usual to open this process to the layman. You sort of define *some* of the terms. But I still have to say that this article is still going to be very tough for anybody to understand who has not already tried to do this stuff and encountered all of these terms before.

By: DBL

DBL — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:22:45 +0000

Too complicated and circular, just like every other stitching tutorial. (I say this as somebody who has stitched successfully and found all tutorials useless in this regard — I discovered my process by trial & error over the course of a full week.) For some reason that I don’t fully understand, people who are interested in stitching panoramas are very bad at explaining themselves clearly, and nearly every tutorial pretty much requires already having done a panorama to understand what the heck they’re talking about — which of course defeats the point.

Three words of advice for every tutorial writer: Define. Your. Terms.

Yes — every single one. Quick and dirty is not the answer. Long and fully backgrounded and referenced, and framed in layman’s term — *that* would be nice to see.