Output from 3 different panorama programs: Calico, DoubleTake and Hugin.
With one eye on the dogs, I quickly shot several photos of the new housing development beside the park. As you’ll see, if you look carefully, the dogs were in 2 places at once. 
Later on, at home, I started working on making a small panorama from the images.
3 different panorama programs
From various sources I learned of 3 different programs that could do the job for me:
- Hugin, a free opensource program that strongly appealed to my budget.
- Calico, US$39 (NZ$62)
- DoubleTake, €17.95 (NZ$40).
I downloaded them all and gave them a whirl. Attached to this post you see a screenshot of all 3 results together
Program defaults
To make the panoramas I first had to use Photoshop to convert the RAW files from my camera to highest quality .jpg files. Then I mainly used the default settings in each program.
The big exception was Hugin as it created a TIFF file by default. After creating the TIFF I restarted Hugin and set it to export to .jpg. I didn’t notice an option to set the output size, so I later opened the enormous .jpg that Hugin produced and exported it from Photoshop as a medium or high quality optimised and resized file.
My impressions
Calico was the easiest to use: I dragged in the photos and moments later the panorama appeared.
DoubleTake somehow decided one photo in the sequence was extraneous and placed it on the right-hand end, even though it belonged in the middle. I had to drag it to the correct place.
After installing Hugin I had to open a folder inside the Hugin folder, double click a disk image and run an additional installer. While Hugin worked (seemingly very slowly) on creating the panorama it reported back what it was doing
How the results look
Then I opened each 800 pixel wide panorama in Preview and made the screenshot you see here. Click the image in this post to see the result at full size.
As you can see, each program produced a result that’s fairly different from the others.
Calico (at the top) strongly appeals. It’s very green (perhaps too green), and feels very ‘present’. Calico produced an 85Kb image, at 800*248 pixels. It was really easy to use, and quick.
DoubleTake seems to make the grass very spindly. Something doesn’t feel quite right, but I can’t say what. DoubleTake produced a 98Kb image, at 800*231 pixels. DoubleTake was easy to use.
Hugin handled the blades of grass OK, but the buildings seem a little ‘soft’, and lacking detail. Hugin produced an 11.7Mb image, at 5721*2094 pixels. Remember, I had to process Hugin’s output through Photoshop to resize the image and I chose an optimisation setting of medium or high (I don’t recall which). Overall, Hugin just seemed harder to use, and definitely involved more messing around.
Decision time
None of these programs is expensive. In the past I would have just paid up for Calico and gone about my photography. Now, though, I need to watch the dollars.
Will I be happy with DoubleTake? Can I be bothered with the messing around that Hugin seems to require? Should I just forget the notion of making panoramas for a while?
It looks like I’m mulling it over.
1 The photos were taken at Cashmere Park, an official off-leash area in Wellington. See the review of the park at Run Spot Run.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I can’t tell you what to buy, but I do have a question. Do any of these do 360° QuickTime VR panoramas? Although they’re not practical for offline viewing, they can be a lot of fun. I used to use a program that did this, but lost it (and its name) in a hard disk formatting.
Hmmm, both Calico and DoubleTake make reference to 360 degrees somewhere in the menus or prefs, but I doubt they do QTVR.
Excellent post. Thanks for doing the comparison.
I agree with you on Hugin – a little fuzzy and low saturation. It is hard to argue with free, but I’m waiting for someone to write a better front end. I too found it clunky.
I find the over-saturation in the Calico shot to be off-putting, but that may be configurable with practice.
I think DoubleTake is the compromise candidate. Sharper detail than Hugin, less colour blowout than Calico.
BTW, when I’m going to be doing post-processing (like pano, or HDR), I convert from RAW to TIFF, rather than jpg. You get out what you put in and I find introducing jpg at any stage other than end product gives me a lesser image. In fact, I usually output as PNG, which is lossless. I also use The GIMP as I can’t afford Photoshop (I think I still have V4 or maybe 6 for Windows knocking around somewhere, but there are many alternatives now).
I agree with your impressions of the software. Calico was soooo easy to use and spat out a nice panorama in no time. Hugin can be difficult to use. I spent hours figuring it out today, but I think I figured out what was wrong and it was mostly user error; all user error when it came to exposure blending problems, I installed the autopano plugin for automatically detecting the seams and it was horrible on the particular set of images I was using.
I haven’t tried DoubleTake. I probably wouldn’t have tried Calico if I knew the cost or the trial conditions (it leaves a watermarks on the image). I’m not really interested in paying for something because I know I’m not going to use it very often.
I was appalled at the amount of info for Calico on the Kekus website. There was almost no info: it doesn’t tell you what kind of trial you get, or what the program can do (beyond panorama stitching, it doesn’t say what kind of panos you can do), or whether paying for it gets you the current version and all versions to come or whether there’s an upgrade price.
When I finally figured out what was going wrong in Hugin with my exposure settings I was impressed with the output. It was smooth and it seems to have a lot more panorama types than Calico (rectilinear, equirectangular, those 360-round ones and more). You can also do single frame and multi-frame HDRs. The interface can be a bit clunky in the sense that it’s hard to know what terms mean if you’re not familiar with them (I found the control point picking fairly natural), but the Hugins docs are useful, especially the descriptions of the User Interface.
I think the setting to control the size of the pano is in the preferences, under Assistant: downscale final pano. It’s in percent rather than pixels though.
I agree with Mark about the TIFFs. I think it’s good to remain as lossless as possible until the end when you do final levels, sharpening & resize.
Thanks for tweeting the link for this post to me! Good to see your experience was similar to mine. Did you end up buying one?
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