Howto create a panorama using Hugin

On my trip to Mahabaleshwar (25th Jan 2009), I had gone to Pratap Gad. I took a series of photos with my Canon PowerShot A530. Its a very basic point and shoot camera. I took the pictures because I wanted to make a panaromic image out of them. I didn't knew how to go about it. Then I installed Ubuntu Studio. I found a software called Hugin panorama creator. I gave it a try.
The steps I followed were:

• Go to Applications -> Graphics -> Hugin panorama creator.
• Follow the assistant i.e. Click on "1. Load Imges" -> Selected all 5 of my images.
• Click "2. Align", it told me to create control points. Control points are points on same objects on your adjecent images. i.e. corner of a roof, present in 2 adjecent images.
• Select a point on both the images and click on "Add" button(present at the bottom). Add a minimum of 2 points per pair of images.
• The click on the "Optimizer" tab and click "Opimize now!".
• Click on the "Exposure" tab. You can select from the presets, I used "High dynamic range, fixed exposure". Then click "Optimize now!".
• Now go to the "Stitcher" tab, click "Calculate Field of View" then "Calculate Optimal Size".
• Then the finally "Stitch Now!".

It took some time on my P4 machine. Output is a ".tif" file. Mine was of 113 MB. I used the following command, to convert it to a jpeg file of 3 MB:

convert pan-01.tif pan-01.jpeg

Then resized it 50% using:

convert pan-01.jpeg -resize 50% pan-01-50.jpeg

The output is :


After editing with GIMP, the final output is:


I would say not bad :). This encourages me to experiment more with my life.