sudo apt-get install hugin autopano-sift

Now, open up Hugin from the Applications -> Graphics menu.  The first step is to import your images.  I’m going to stitch together four images for this demo, though I have tried the exact same procedure with 20 and it came out beautifully.  Here are the three images in gThumb:

Simply drag-and-drop these into the Images tab of Hugin:

Now, we need to generate the control points.  These are the places each image has in common with its neighbor.  We can make these manually in the control points tab, but that’s tedious and crappy, and the computer can do it just fine on its own.  In the same Images tab, there will be a part at the bottom that says Feature Matching (Autopano). Set the Points per Overlap to 7, since that should be sufficient for most stitching, then click Create control points.  After it does its thing, you’ll see something like this:

Click OK, and move on to the Optimizer tab.  Here, we can automatically tweak the parameters of each photo.  First, let’s just do positions starting from the anchor image (which is the first one by default).  Make sure to uncheck the first checkbox, as shown here:

Once that’s finished, you’ll see something like this:

If these numbers are small (like less than 30 or so), go ahead and hit Yes.  Otherwise, you need to go take a look at your control points manually, and possibly shift your anchor image for position, both of which are beyond the scope of this tutorial.  These numbers look perfect, and are what we expect from autopano magic.  Now, let’s fix lens issues with another pass in a different mode.

Hit Optimize Now! again, and click Yes when it finishes.  We’re done positioning.  Now, let’s fix the exposure.  Click the Exposure tab, and you’ll see something like this:

Set it up as shown, making sure to uncheck that box.  Then click Optimize Now! and Yes like before.  You’ve now balanced the exposure levels of the images.  Let’s take a look by hitting the Preview button, which looks like this:

You’ll see an image in crosshairs, and some buttons at the top:

Click Straighten, and then Center.  You should now have your image all set to go.  Don’t drag it around, you’ll just ruin it.

Now, go back to the main window, and click the Stitcher tab.

Click Calculate Optimal Size to get the correct numbers in the boxes.  Then, click Stitch Now!.  After lots of thinking, you’ll end up back at the same screen.  That means it finished.  Now, check out the result!

It obviously needs some cropping, but I have to say it’s not bad!  Let’s open it in GIMP and finish it up.  I simply cropped it into a nice rectangle, tweaked the colors, and saved it as a 95% quality JPEG.  You can delete the TIFF file if you want – it’s probably huge.  Here’s the result:

So, now you too can make beautiful panoramas.  Here’s now I did recently from the top of Die Wank in Garmisch, Germany:

So, I was trying to get rid of the obvious flaw in the following picture, and I found a pretty easy way to do it with GIMP.

Now, I’m no expert at GIMP or anything, but all I did was select the region in question using the lasso, like so:

Then, I used the Colors -> Components -> Channel Mixer tool to bend it to my will (make sure you grow your selection to encompass the whole flare using the Select -> Grow tool):

Notice how in the preview window the blemish isn’t visible?  That’s what you want.  Now, hit OK.

So, now all we have is a little bit of a color/contrast issue.  Let’s fix that up with the Colors -> Color Balance tool:

Now, if you look closely, you can still see just a tiny bit of brightness, but that’s alright with me – it’s much better than the blue crap.  Here’s the end result:

And there you have it: how to remove those annoying lens flares with GIMP.

The ideal candidate according to America

So I decided to have some fun.

I saw this today, and thought it was hilarious. Basically, this is the main point of the whole thing:

So I decided to have some fun. Here are the results:

The obvious one

This one just couldn’t help being done.

Fun with filters

These were all made using The GIMP – it has some pretty cool filters like this one, which is sparkle. I used the hue and saturation tool to get the blue effect.

AA Meeting, Anyone?

This probably isn’t true, but you never know…

That’s Not True! Thats IMPOSSIBLE!!

Nooooo!!!!!

The XCF is available if you want to make your own.

So, now that that’s done, time to go do something productive…