 So I'm on vacation in Colorado and I want to review some software that I've been playing with, Higgins I believe is how it's pronounced. And so I'm going to go out here into my friend's front yard and I'm going to spin around and take some pictures while I'm doing it. Don't have a tripod, they say it's the best way to do this so everything's lined up properly. But the little bit I've played with this software seems to do a pretty good job even with a handheld camera. So here I go, I'm going to do this and I'm probably going to get a few other shots out here in Colorado, hopefully higher up in the mountains as well. So I hope it turns out well. As I mentioned last week, two weeks ago I was in Colorado and I took a bunch of pictures here, some of the thumbnails. So this is our friend's house that we stayed at and I took this with my Canon T3i. I went out to their front yard here, spun around in a circle, clicking pictures, making sure that they overlap slightly. So like you can see right here, let's make this a little bit bigger. You can see right here, you can see this tree. If I go to the next picture, there's that tree there. So, you know, a pretty decent amount of overlap is good. So I spun in a circle there. There is one panorama and these are mostly complete 360, 360, 360 degree photos. Here's one up on a scenic overview of Cripple Creek. Here is one that, this is Ute Valley. It's actually the spot I proposed to my wife many years ago. Here, this is also Ute Valley. Also Ute Valley. That's also Ute Valley. There's a nice place to take pictures. Here we've got my friend's house where we stayed. This is the backyard of his house. And then this is his parents' house, the front yard. They have a very nice house. So I got some pictures from their backyard as well. This is also the same shot from the backyard. Only I held the camera in portrait view, thinking that I'd get a wider or more of a vertical view. And this is actually inside their little guest area in their basement. So what we're going to do today is we're going to take these shots and we're going to throw them into this program called Huggin. I assume is how you say that. Huggin, when you install it, it's in your repositories. It's usually installed under graphics. It has three different applications here when it's installed. And we're using the Huggin panorama creator, which has a lot of options. And I haven't really touched anything. I usually go with mostly the default options. So I'm going to click load images here. I'm going to go where I have those images saved, which is on this hard drive here. We'll go to the first panorama here. I'm going to shift a select all of the images in there. And there we go. It's loading them up and it's generating a little preview. Now, just for the record, I am using version... Is this the version number? 2013, 00.7, because I have used previous versions and the interface is slightly different, but the same basic concept with this. So now that they're loaded, I'm going to click align, which I know I think when I was on Linux Mint, this window looks different, like this is in a different tab, but this information is on the first screen. The line is below, but basically you click load images, you click align. And it will take a couple of minutes. It's going to first do a lens correction on all the images. Now, it did not ask me anything about my lens because of the type of camera I use. That information is embedded in the image files itself. But if you're using something like your cell phone, which I know a lot of cell phones, pretty much all cell phones either have built-in or third-party applications, you can download to create panoramas right on the phone. But if for some reason you didn't or you're using a little point-and-shoot and it doesn't have lens information, just Google it. I tried it with my phone and I just Googled because it will ask you if the information in there for the focal length I think is what it asks for. Or the focal length multiplier. If you put in one, I think it fills in the other. And I just Googled most common or average cell phone focal length or focal length modifier. And I just typed in the first number I saw and it worked fine. I actually did take some pictures of myself on it and copied them here. I just remembered of the same house that we're working at here. And I was going to do that in this tutorial. But now you can see it has now taken all those images. And it has aligned them into a panorama. So now this is a quick preview. I'm going to go over here and click create panorama. And it's going to give us some options here now. If you're using an older version, because once again I'm using Debian SID, which is unstable. And so if you're using something like Linux Mentor Debian, or I'm sorry, Ubuntu or the stable version of Debian, at the time of making this video, you might be running an older version where these options for file format, which I'm going to change to a PNG. Actually I'm going to change to, yeah, PNG. It doesn't really matter. Except for, well, let me just finish what I was saying a second ago. Before, in the older version, I think these options were under crop. I think it was in wherever the last tab was to change the format. And then also you have the size options here. I think this newer interface is a little bit cleaner looking, a little more straightforward. The other one had a lot of different crop options, which are probably still under crop. The reason I'm changing it to PNG, I'm not printing this. I'm going to use it in a little on a website. So if you leave it as a TIF, especially something with this big of a panorama, I think I tried this one because I did a test run before I do in the tutorials here. And I think it was this shot. And it turned out to be a half a gig. It was 500 megabytes of a file. So I'm just going to do PNG here. And in fact, I am going to lower my height way down to 400. And it automatically adjusts over here. And the reason I'm doing that is once again, I'm going to use a little JavaScript to create a panorama application, which I might look at in the following weeks here and show you how to do it's open source code that I got off the internet, off GitHub. But I'm going to click OK. And then I'm just going to, this project needs to save. Oh, it's going to ask you to save the PTO file, which is just the project file, basically information. So you can come back later and make modifications if you want. We'll save that and then ask what you want to call the panorama by default. It gives you the names of the first and last. I'm just going to say pan one is what I'll call this. I'll probably rename it later on. And I will click save. Now we wait. And this will probably take, well, I know it took a couple of minutes when I did the test run on this photo, but that was at the full resolution as a TIFF. I don't know if lowering the resolution will speed it up or if it still has to go through all the same process before it resizes it anyway. But we might fast forward the video here just a little bit. Okay, that actually went pretty fast. Also, when you start creating the panorama, this little batch processor window opens up. I've never touched anything in here. Once again, I have used the bare minimums of this program here. So let's go here. Let's go up. And right here is our panorama file. Once again, I lowered the resolution way down for the height. But even at this low resolution, it looks great. And you'll see there will be links in the description below that will bring you to the panorama JavaScript that I put on my site. And you'll actually be able to spin this forever because it is seamless. So that is the panorama right there. Now, I'm going to do this for the rest of the photos. And then I'll get back. I'm not going to put you through this process. But I took pictures in different ways to see different results. And I'm going to see how they turn out. And I'll go over that at the end. Okay, so I have gone through all these. I also should have mentioned. I also have other, I don't know why I copied folders inside folders here of different shots. But let's quickly have a look at some of our panoramas here. So they're all my site. Once again, all these links are in the description below. So here is the first house shot that we did earlier. So I can drag this and you can see, or I can scroll with my mouse. This also works on cell phones. At least my cell phone does. So you can see this pans forever. I can go back and look at the second shot of their house. And a nice view we have out in Colorado, which is why I did this out in Colorado. Because I live in Florida where everything is flat. So you wouldn't have much of a view in these panoramas. Even got some people in this one here. Let's go to another one. So here, this one is kind of up close. And I think this is one of the ones that I held the camera in portrait mode. So I am getting, being up close like this, definitely some bowing of the lens. Even though it calibrates your lens distortion to fit it with other images. But it still has to distort the images a little bit to make them fit. You know what I'm saying? So we got that one. I want to show you, I think, this one. Yes, this one. Okay. This one I want to point out from an inside shot. And in this shot I had some windows here with bright light coming in them. So let me go here and see if I can. Right here. Okay. I want to point out. Look how dark this image is compared to what I'm pointing with the light. And very different. Huggin does a great job of adjusting the brightness and contrast the levels to match the images. So even if the images are different brightness and contrast or have different levels because of lighting, it will adjust automatically just with the default settings on it. So you can see they all still fit great. Although there are some times, and it's one of these Ute Valley ones. Actually, I think two of the Ute Valley ones. Oh, there. This one got this dark spot in the middle. So I don't know if I ran it through again. Maybe that was a one time glitch. I'm not really sure why that happened. It still is a seamless image, but we just have that dark spot there. I think on one of the other Ute Valley ones. Yeah, it's a little darker right there. It's not as obvious as it was in the other ones. So once again, I think this program does a great job out of the box. Here's Manitou. Now this is one I ran out in the middle of the street. I'm actually standing in the middle of a roundabout. And I didn't do a complete 360 when I was taking the pictures. So that's why we don't have a match up there because I didn't spin all the way around. I thought I did. I didn't want to get hit by a car, so I did kind of fast. But I do want to note on this one, if I can find... I should have labeled these better than just numbering them. Okay, so here's this one. I want to point out like this. There's a big old truck there in this shot. And he's moved down the street there. And a huggin... I still hope I'm saying that right. Huggin does a great job. That truck's completely gone. I didn't go in there and remove it. The software match up even with these cars driving by. I thought for sure I was going to get half that truck in this picture. But it's like it detected the truck and removed it. It did a great job. My fault for not spinning all the way around. But I really thought that I was going to have a whole bunch of half cars here from the cars going by. Now I do want to go back. Oh, and right there was one more example I want to show you that did not work. And I'll explain why. At least why I think it didn't work. This one's in Cripple Creek. And that one worked. I'll show you that one back here. I guess I didn't... Oh, Cripple Creek one. That's probably it. There we go. So this one worked right out in front of their old fire station there. Nice little spin around with some buildings up close, buildings far away. But I took another shot in Cripple Creek right here, this one. I thought how great would it be to have like a whole row of buildings? I knew it wouldn't be a 360 but I just took a shot here, walked a little bit further, took a shot, walked a little bit further, took a shot, walked a little bit further, took a shot. And Hugen did not match any of them up. My assumption is that Hugen is for 360s or panoramas standing from one area. We're here, I kind of walked down the street rather than spinning in one spot. Now, I don't know if Hugen has options in it. Like once again I have not played with any of the options. I go in there, I load the images, I click align, I click create panorama. And besides changing it from TIF to either a PNG or a JPEG and changing the resolution of my output, that's the only options I've played with. So there might be options to get this to work where you're walking down the street. But it does not work with the default settings. I'm assuming once again because Hugen is designed for you to stand in one spot and spin. So you don't have to go a full 360, but you don't want to be walking and taking pictures. I read some comments on one YouTube video that I watched when I first found out about Hugen. And this one guy was going, not one of my pictures, it didn't match any of them up. And he was going on and on about how much his program sucked. And I personally am completely amazed by it. And I'm assuming maybe he did something like this where he took a panorama walking or moving rather than standing in one spot. And once again, I don't know if Hugen has features for that. So I hope this tutorial isn't busy. It's more of a review on how great I think the software is. And so now I do want to find the right folder. I think it was one of the... Okay, this one of Cripple Creek. I am going to... I don't know if I have to close Hugen or if I can just click load. I don't want to click load and have it try to merge images from different folders. So I'm going to click load here. I am going to go into... I think it was pan one. Select all these, open. And give it a second here. And while it's loading these... Once it's loaded, I'm going to click a line. The problem I had with this image is that I'm taking it on an overlook. So I'm looking down at this town. And then as I spun around, I kind of tilted the camera up. Once again, I did none of these with tripods. I did all these handheld, which just makes it even more amazing if you ask me. And what happened is I kind of pointed the camera up as I turned away from the town. So I didn't get a straight view. So let me go back to Hugen here. It's still aligning those photos. I'll fast forward through this a little bit. Okay, so at this point, it's not... Oh, just finished there. So last thing it does is searching for best crop point. You'll notice that it did a great job of merging all the images together. But they're not in a straight line. And because I pointed the camera up one way and down the other, so they don't line up that way. And it did its best to crop where it could and did create a little panorama here, but it's not a full 360 even though I spun all the way around. If we click on the tab here for drag and move, and I click like this, I can try to adjust this to the best of my abilities and make it straight like so. And then let's go to our crop here, and I'm going to click Auto Crop at this point and let it calculate that. Okay, and so that is how you adjust that. If you ended up doing that, which I'm kind of glad I did. I didn't do that on purpose when I took that photo. But it was very simple. I hit that, just go to move and drag, drag them around, and then adjust. So now I got a full 360. I guess it will be kind of distorted a little bit. I actually haven't rendered this out yet. So that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to go to Assistant. I'm going to click Create Panorama. Once again, I'm going to put it to a JPEG here. I'm sorry, I'll do a PNG. It doesn't really matter. And I'll say 400 for height. When I hit out of that box, it automatically adjusts the width. Here you can see it's checked to do exposure corrected, low dynamic range. I'm assuming I've never unchecked that. I'm assuming that's what adjusts the exposure, like I showed you on the inside shot. Once again, it's going to say you got to save the project, save it, and then what do I want to name it. I'll call it Cripple Creek View. I'll just put an extension for me. I'll click Save. And we'll let it go. Once again, it does seem to go a lot faster when I resize it. I did one or two of these while on vacation on my laptop. I had Linux Mint on my laptop, so I was running an older version of Huggin, and I wasn't resizing them. I was doing full resolution, and it would take quite a while for these to run out. So it's done already. I am on my desktop, which is faster, but that's extremely faster than what I was getting on my laptop. So I'm thinking it must be because I resized it before I was doing the full size. So here we go. Here is, and it looks like that sign is, so it looks like it all lines up right. And so that's a nice wide panorama with the town there, my wife and the car there. And I'll have to upload this one to my website now as well. So hopefully I'll remember to put this one in the link in the description. So again, I hope this video wasn't too boring. I just thought this program is great on how great of a job it does in these 360 panoramas. And again, I used a T3i on all of these, and so very large high definition images, and it just does a great job of blending the images, lining them up, adjusting the lens distortion. I guess it doesn't really adjust the lens distortion, it just detects it to line them up properly. I don't know all the technical aspects of it. So again, check out the links in the description. Every one of these should be up there with a JavaScript. And hopefully next week, or the week after on Wednesday, I'll give you a quick look at that JavaScript, which is an open source code that I got off GitHub that allows you to do those nice pans, works on cell phones and tablets with touch screens, and you can just spin the thing around all day long. Hopefully in the future, I might get myself a fisheye lens and do complete, I don't know if this is a 360, I don't know what you would call looking all around, because I have looked at HTML5 stuff to create those virtual views, like a street view on Google. And although I could probably do it with a regular lens, taking a lot of photos and using Huggin, I'm thinking that if I can get myself a fisheye lens, it might save myself a little bit of trouble and not getting so dizzy spinning around so many times trying to get all the different angles. So hopefully in the future, I'll figure out the technique for getting those photos because I've already looked at the code for displaying it. And again, check out the links in the description again for all these panoramas. And I hope that you have a great day.