[ptx] Hugin, my griefs...

[Tijmen]

Hello. I currently use hugin v0.5 beta 3, so if things have been fixed in 
later versions, please shoot me...

Since I work with hugin I really like the program, but there are some things 
which really annoy me. The list:

- Setting the anchor point when it is not in the exact center and not right to 
the horizon is really painful. I do a lot of handheld panoramas (I do so 
because Hugin can work with those :-)) but, if your anchor lines are a bit 
away from the center and turned, you can first left-click to set the right 
*point*, but then if you then right-drag to set the right rotation, it 
rotates around the centre of the image (or some other point?), not around the 
anchor centre you just set by right-clicking. rotating around the anchor 
centre would be far more natural in my view.
-Another grief with the anchor point is that hugin starts remapping 
immediately, so you can't reclick within 2 or 3 seconds after you've done so. 
IMHO hugin shouldn't start remapping until after you've closed the "set 
anchor point" window.
-Another point about anchor point: How do you set anchor lines that are not in 
90 degree angles (visualize: making a architectural pano of the north face of 
a building, where your viewpoint was northwest to, not north of the 
building). Is this possible? If so, How?
-I'm not sure, but I have the feeling that hugin won't correctly react on a 
change of the anchor point without a full reload (save the .pto, close hugin 
and reload). 

-In the panorama preview window the slidebars confuse me very much.
I allways mistake them for scrollbars while in fact they are view angle 
sliders (or am I mistaken?).
IMHO, there should be the big view of the pano preview where you can zoom in 
(using a separate slider, or the scroll wheel) and pan around (with the 
sliders), much like you view an image in the GIMP.
Then, there could be a separate window where you can set the view angles. It 
would be very useful if you could also set crop lines (top, bottom, left, 
right) in this window, to save the post-editing step to cut off the black if 
not neccecary. (that's the only thing I do in GIMP, and convert from tiff to 
jpg if I used emblend)

-I haven't been able to run enblend from within hugin, but I think I have to 
tinker with settings and/or update stuff for that locally.

-You can only select "cylindrical" panorama, but not whether it's a vertical 
or horizontal cylinder. This confused me as I have one image ready to do with 
a horizontal but it will only do vertical cylinder. I haven't been able to 
quickly "rotate" the cylinder 90 degrees (or rotate the image. I thought I 
could rotate the anchor spot to achieve this, but that proved unsuccesfull).
(BTW, this was while working on a hemispherical image. I wanted a shot 
"Straight up".

If there are points where I have obviously misunderstood hugin, please explain 
it to me. Also, I mean nothing bad, I could write a much longer mail on the 
good points of hugin but that would be boring. Also, if you don't understand 
my problems, I'll elaborate them by drawings and screenshots.

Tijmen