Panoramic stitching

[lethargic_man]

I've been applying myself to using hugin to stitch together my panoramic photos from my holiday, and oh boy. When it works well, it does a really good job, but when it doesn't, you get some monstrosities, and it's impossible to figure out how to fix them.

So I looked at the FAQ, and the tutorials, and they made reference to an "Assistant" tab that puts in all the control points, and does a better job by and large than doing it by hand... and wasn't present in my version of hugin. I was using the latest version of hugin for Fedora 8, but there's the rub: Red Hat keep releasing new versions of their operating systems on a frequent basis, and don't update software for very long on the old ones (except for security reasons); and I wouldn't be able to use the version for later versions of Fedora as the version numbers of dependent software wouldn't match. If I wanted the most recent version of hugin, I'd either have to upgrade my OS, or compile it myself.

I went for compiling it myself, which was relatively painless, as I found a web page giving the dependency list as a series of parameters to pass to yum (to download and install for me). I had more trouble with enblend, though: hugin passed an option to enblend that my version of enblend didn't recognise, and when I tried to compile the latest version of enblend, it failed at:

checking for cmsCreateTransform in -llcms... no

despite:

[michael@epicyclic tmp]$ locate liblcms
/usr/lib/liblcms.so.1
/usr/lib/liblcms.so.1.0.16
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-icedtea-1.7.0.0/jre/lib/i386/liblcms.so
[michael@epicyclic tmp]$ 

In the end, I worked around the issue with a /usr/local/bin/enblend:

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/enblend `echo $@ | sed -e 's/--compression NONE//'`

...and I got a reasonable panoramic of my photo of Seville cathedral, after wasting a considerable amount of time trying it manually with the old hugin. But if this sort of thing happens again, I think it's going to have to be time to upgrade OS.