New version of the popular panorama stitcher is now even friendlier towards beginners. If you want an awesome panorama without much fiddling with settings, Hugin is very nearly there.

Now the user interface of Hugin has three modes: Simple (default), Advanced, and Expert. The simple UI is basically the old panorama preview dialog with panorama stitching wizard added on top of it, so you can still create a panorama in just three steps.

If you are not familiar with the procedure, it's all dead easy.

1. Add original images.

2. Launch alignment of the pictures. Hugin will attempt to discover matching features in pairs of images and re-align them.

This step is also where you pick mapping (e.g. Panini is great for architecture) and set cropping to remove "leftovers" — bits of the original images mashed with black background due to transformmations.

3. Finally, choose how you want Hugin to handle stacks of exposure bracketed images, if you have those, pick a file format to save the panorama in, and let it build the final image for you.

All the extra things like editing control points, creating masks to remove objects etc. are only visible in Advanced and Expert modes. Which is where you see the old main window of Hugin.

Frankly speaking, if you are already faimiliar with Hugin, you will probably find the user interface related changes not exactly dramatic. After all, Hugin developers preserved most of what already was there and rearranged guts and limbs in a different way (still, no drama).

Typically for Hugin, the release comes with a few new command line tools:

pto_var , changes image variables inside PTO files;

, changes image variables inside PTO files; pto_lensstack , modifies assigned lenses and stack in PTO files;

, modifies assigned lenses and stack in PTO files; geocpset, sets or adds geometric constraints for multirow panoramas with featureless images.

There's of course, a number of bugfixes and smaller improvements all around. Source code and builds for various systems are available on SourceForge.