hugin: 0.8.0 released

Hugin is a panorama stitcher and more.

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/releases/0.8.0/

Changes since 0.7.0

The last release in October 2008 introduced major changes to the way
hugin worked. Although this new release looks and feels much the
same as 0.7.0, it adds some great new features and makes a lot of
small improvements:

Fast Preview window

A new Fast Preview window has been added, this uses OpenGL graphics
acceleration to show changes as they happen. You can drag photos
around the window and they will warp to their new positions in
real-time. Everything else you need to turn, pan and crop your
panorama can now be done interactively in the Fast Preview.

This Fast Preview also now acts as a hub for working with a panorama
project: the Identify mode lets you click on the overlap between two
photos to bring up the Control Point editor for that pair of photos.

Celeste sky identification

Stitching makes use of static scenery such as buildings to match
photos together, however objects that move cause misalignments, and
clouds move enough to be a particular problem. To make better
panoramas, Hugin has now been trained as a Support Vector Machine to
ignore clouds when matching photos.

New panorama projections

Panoramas tend to have a very large field of view, and Hugin does a
good job simulating virtual wide-angle lenses for output. But
painters and artists can do better than photographers, often
spanning scenes that look absurdly distorted when squeezed into
photographic perspective. Influenced by these vedutismo artists,
Hugin introduces some new projections for more elegant wide-angle
perspectives: Pannini, Biplane and Triplane.

In addition, Orthographic and Equisolid output have been added to
Hugin's already extensive set of azimuthal projections.

Batch Processor

Creating Hugin projects is now easier than ever, but actually
stitching large panoramas slows your computer - Usually at the same
time that you want to do something else. Now with the Hugin Batch
Processor, stitching can be postponed until it is convenient for
you.

Projects can be added to the queue from Hugin itself, or directly by
drag-and-drop from a file manager. In the Batch Processor you get an
overview of progress where the projects can be easily rearranged,
paused or canceled.

Online help

The manual has been updated to cover the new features and adds more
glossary pages explaining panorama and photography related words.

Languages

Most translations have been updated, plus Hugin is now available in
Slovenian and Chinese Traditional. The manual has been completely
translated into Italian.

Other improvements

There are many more changes in this release, here are just some of
them: a Reset... button in the Camera and Lens tab, better support
for 'special' characters in folder and file names, Align... now
works properly when loading saved lens .ini files, hints added to
Control Point tab pull-down lists, stitching now starts with a
series of tests, gcc-4.4.0 support, better Makefile plugin support,
man pages for command-line tools, new button icons throughout and a
command-line version of Celeste

Control point generators

Hugin doesn't yet ship with a 'Patent Free' control point generator.
So you either need to pick control points manually - Not as
difficult as it sounds - or install and configure one of the
following control-point generators as 'plug-ins':

* autopano-sift-C
* panomatic
* match-n-shift
* Autopano-SIFT
* Autopano freeware version

Upgrading

Upgrading from previous versions of hugin should be seamless. If you
do have problems with old settings, these can be reset in the
Preferences by clicking 'Load defaults'.

For users compiling from source: note that the minimum version of
wxWidgets supported is now 2.7.0, libpano13 needs to be at least
2.9.14, and that hugin now requires GLEW, the OpenGL Extension
Wrangler Library.

See the the README and INSTALL_cmake files for more information.

Thanks to all the contributors to this release and members of the
hugin-ptx mailing list, too many to mention here.

Hugin can be found at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

Hugin sourcecode can be downloaded from sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/

SHA1SUM: 698f0a7c4bb25efdf06313d05e3980f20d088ce5 hugin-0.8.0.tar.gz

This release is identical to 0.8.0_rc5 and equivalent to svn 4008.