Originally posted by KrisK10D Does anyone use it?
I'm having all sorts of trouble stitching together 9 shots of a bridge
Here's the best result I've got so far
It's doing all sorts of weird stuff even changing the colour of things in the images used. I'm very distressed
I am at a firewalled computer (government related), so I can't see your image. I'm not sure what your problems are, but I have used Hugin. It is a bit of a challenging program to use. I'm not sure what your problems are since I can't see your image at the moment, but the key thing I found was to look through some of their tutorials on the Hugin websites.
While it is a complicated program, I've found it to be among the best for panorama stitching. The key is to choose the correct projection from the start. You then need to let it automatically process the match points. It will not perfectly match on the first try, so then you want to erase matches that aren't correct and add new ones. Adding manual match points isn't terribly easy, and I use the program so infrequently, that I find that I am having to hunt around a little to make it work.
In the original photos it helps if you have sufficient overlap. You also want to make sure you don't have so much overlap that one image might overlap multiple others (e.g. 2 to the right). If they do, you need to make sure you have enough match points everywhere. I had this problem once as I conservatively made a pano that one image matched two images right of it. I had to make sure there were match points for both the right images. I hope this isn't too confusing.
As for the color issue, I suggest turning off some of the blending features. Make sure you get the match points worked out. Hugin tries to do a lot of things, and you don't necessarily need them all. It does help if the original panorama is taken all at the same settings (i.e. M mode with same shutter speed and aperture). This is at least important when starting. I also suggest starting out with 2 or 3 images rather than the full nine to get the hang of the program.