using smartblend

Smart blend is now my choice for blending software. It is much faster than enblend 3.1 and enfuse that comes with Hugin RC2 for windows. Less than 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes.

Better still, I no longer need to do any cropping in order to improve the resolution of the blended pictures. Enfuse tends to distort the pictures which are not overlapping perfectly, which is usually the case for me since I don't use a pano head.

Enfuse is better at exposure blending but smartblend is better than enblend and does not introduce distortion in overlapped regions. Smartblend probably has an autocrop function.

I just enblendGUI in order to make it easy for me to invoke smartblend but it means that I cannot use other options because smartblend is not compatible with enblend when it comes to specifying options. Have to be satisfied with the default which is good enough for me.

If you want to specify other options, you may need to edit cmd batch files. Enfuse has a good GUI which allows us to specify all options in a GUI environment.

Since I bought the Panasonic Fx520, I was able to compare fixed exposures versus programmed exposures which optimise exposures for each scene. Enfuse is able to merge exposures perfectly and allows us to have an HDR quality viewable panormaic pictures. smartblend is not as good but manageable.

Samples of both techniques are presented in my blog sabahheaven.blogspot.com

smartblend however failed to blend heavily overlapped pictures, such as the case with bracketed exposures. Since I don't use a tripod for my bracket exposures, there are bound to be slight misalignments between bracketed exposures. Enfuse will not be able to blend these pictures without any loss of resolution.

Hugin, though autopano or manual control point insertion, does not allow high precision stiching of pcitures to form a perfect panorama. It is even worse for me because I don't use a pano head. Using philipod, i.e. a piece of string to lock the position of my lens focus point, is not good enough.

In the end, I simply choose the best exposures and blend only one set of panoramic picture. I don't think hugin is well equipped for HDR panorama yet. 3 bracketed exposures also do not give sufficient dynamic range as shown by the HDR viewers.