Hugin tutorial - direct to just enfuse

How to enfuse bracketed images, skipping the panorama part in the hugin interface. Thank you to Terry Duell and Erik Krause for the help in overcoming the hurdles. (Created November 22 2014)

Applies only to Windows users!

The second time is a lot faster than the first time through the very explicit instructions here.

Hugin is an Open Source panorama stitcher and graphical user interface (GUI) for Panorama tools. Hugin page at panotools.

Its strength comes from it being a neat wrapper to a bunch of specialized tools from a community of developers. Its weakness is that sometimes certain tools are updated and change their command line structure which breaks the previous downloaded collection.

To avoid confusion, enfuse merges bracketed images; while enblend is a panorama stitcher. If you have handheld and want to do HDR, you will first need to align the images with hugin, but if you are preparing for time lapses, you will be on a tripod so no alignment necessary.

  1. Download Hugin from main page or sourceforge latest & install, make sure you install (check yes to) all the related tools. Mine ended up here: C:\Program Files\Hugin
    1. Launch Hugin (my version is 2013.0.0.0d404a7088e6). First time only: Go to File, click and choose Preferences:
    1. Choose the Stitching tab, decide on jpg or tif. Processor: choose Hugin_stitch_project, and I like the copy metadata so the files have the same "creation" date as the originals.
      1. Go to Interface and choose expert <even though we are beginners; grin>. Then load images with the plus icon:
      1. Right-click on image 1 (and after, image 2)
      1. Click on "Stacks", then "Change stack", then set to zero. Below, in lens type, if it does not show your lens, enter it manually. For my Moon time lapses, I use a normal lens, and the values showed up automatically thanks to the built-in EXIF reader.
    1. Click on the "Sticher" tab in the main window, and click the Projection drop-down to choose Rectilinear for your final projection:
      1. and click on calculate field of view.
    1. For Canvas size, enter your original image dimensions, for me it was 5184x3456. I uncheck Panorama Outputs. Under "Combined Stacks" I check Exposure fused stacks, and click on options under Image fusion to put in the enfuse commands, same as in the droplet:
    2. --exposure-weight=1.0 --saturation-weight=0.2, click OK, then stitch!.
      1. This is the default. EnfuseGUI will help you choose other parameters. Consult the latest enfuse/enblend manuals. Click the drop down and choose the latest version for enfuse to make sure you are using the new parameter syntax.
    1. You will be asked for a prefix, try the name of the first image in the bracket. Then a window opens to show you the progress, and then it disappears and you go into the file folder to find your result.
      1. ====>
      1. As I said, I still need to tweak the parameters to get the balance/range I want. Then again, can I do it with just 2 exposures?