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Thursday, October 2, 2014

Tutorial: Using Hugin and EnfuseGUI for astrophotography

Hugin is often used for stiching panoramas, it does it very well. Alignment is precise, vignette removal is superior compared to anything Ive used.
These two features make it the best software to align image stacks - for example astrophotography. Here is how I process my photos step-by-step.

When you lauch Hugin for the first time, it looks like this. This is simplified version of it and what we want is to enable them all. On the top left select Interface and change that to Expert mode.
Now go to folder you have your images, convert them to 16bit tiff at original size and resolution and do not make any adjustments in any software before! Stack first, edit later is the general rule.



Drag and drop the images in Hugin, after they have loaded in the Photos tab click Create control points, left corner underneath the file list. Hugin starts calculating the control points automatically, 99% of the photos Ive processed this is enough so you dont have to set control points manually. However if you dont get the alignment right you can do this in the control points tab simply by adding control points in the image pairs. Make sure they are a match.
But for now dont mess with them, press Control + T and after the optimizer has finished click ok.

Preview window.
Now lets see what your stack looks like: Press Control + P for preview. There is alot of empty space around the actual images, to fix this press Centre in the upper left corner and then update the preview with update button. Now just close the preview window and go to Sticher tab.
Click on the Calculate Field-of-view, after that has finished click on Calculate optimal size and after that Fit crop to images. By doing this Hugin calculates original size, field of view and crops out empty areas to speed out stiching.

In the Sticher tab (panorama outputs) deselect Exposure correction, low dynamic range. Move down to Remapped images and select No Exposure correction, low dynamic range. After that move down to Processing. Select Nona Options. A small window pops up, deselect Save cropped images so Hugin doesnt do unnecesary images wich you dont need.
Then press stich and let Hugin do its magic, make sure you save the images in diffrent folder so you dont mix up the tiffs you just put in. You end up with bunch of files, the filenames are probably something like _MG_xxxx - _MG_xxxx_exposure_layers_0000. Dont worry about them, now open EnfuseGUI and just drag and drop images in there.

EnfuseGUI


In the EnfuseGUI set bracket count to as many images you have. On the right side there is Fusion options, there is many ways to do this but I prefer these settings.

Then just press Enfuse it! on the right side of the file list. EnfuseGUI creates new folder called Enfused in the same folder where your images are.
Open folder and you will find a tiff file on the root. Import this to Lightroom, Photoshop or any other program for further processing. If you dont find image in there youre probably out of memory, stack less images using same method in the EnfuseGUI and after youve stacked them all as separate files add stacked images for final stacking.

Settings
EnfuseGUI overview

















Downloads:
Both of these softwares are free to use, download Hugin here and EnfuseGUI here.

1 comment:

  1. Wonderful! I note that there is a dearth of astophotography for the Mac, but I find that hugin works great on the Mac for panography.

    Have you used other star-stacking software? Does purpose-built astrophoto software have a lot that hugin doesn't do?

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete