Panorama stitching with Hugin (basic)
Hugin (FREE) can do all sorts of amazing panorama stitching, including built-in masking and high dynamic range creation and blending.
The home site has all sorts of tutorials. I have created my own here for basic panoramas in order to capture my own workflow. Unfortunately, the interface is non-linear, so it is not always obvious what to do next.
Here is a quick walk through for a basic panorama
Click on the interface tab, choose simple; there are different interfaces for simple, intermediate and advanced.
1. Load images, for this session, Luca Vanzella's 3 handheld views from the Promenade, in Edmonton, Alberta:
The interface assumes you shot the sequential images left to right, and gives the following:
Obviously there is a lot of overlap, but not to worry, this is blind positioning without actually trying to register the images. Now I notice under focal length, that it was not the right settings. The actual focal length was 11mm, and Luca's camera has a 1.6x multiplier (not a full frame camera). So I changed these - the images shifted then settled back pretty much to where they were. The move/drag tab lets you select an image and drag it into the proper position, which you will need to do if you take panoramas in an unusual way. In this case, I am curious to see how it does without my help, since the images here are ordered properly.
2. Click on "2 Align". It then churns for a few seconds, finding matching points, In this case, it was under a minute to create the following:
You can click create panorama right now, or if you don't mind some black background in order to show a wider pano, then click on the crop tab at the top. Click and drag the edges until you have something you like. Now this is where the interface is a little non-linear. To get to the next step, you click on the "Assistant" tab at far left, and you will once again see the button "3. Create panorama."
Click okay a few times, choose the defaults; it then sets up some utilities under the hood, runs them, and within a minute you have your final image!
Any questions, just let me know, and I'll see what I can do to help.