After lazily letting you guys do all the work stitching panoramas, I've finally set up Hugin and tried stitching my own. I worked through a tutorial or two and have managed to make a panorama whose frames are nicely blended, but there are vignetting problems that I don't know how to deal with. Can someone offer me advice on what settings I should try to change, and how?

Emily....I'm new to using Hugin also but the problem I'm having is when it "aligns" photos it indicates that I don't have any control points and then I have to go in and manully set them. Any help or advice on this would be great
....but I do like the program

Hmm - I've used Hugin a bit ( I'm used to PTGui ) but can't replicate the problem you're having.

Maybe zip up the source files and let us try with those?

Sure, should've done that earlier. The zip file (24 MB) contains 11 de-Bayered Mastcam frames, the Hugin .pto and .mk files, and the resulting stitched panorama in all its vignetted glory.

Thanks for any help you can provide. Whatever tips people can give me will be incorporated into a blog post, so if some other n00b has the same questions we can point them there

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/emily/00...8000C0_DXXX.zip

The version of hugin in the Ubuntu 10.04 distribution (Version 2009.2.0.4461), using autopano-sift for registration and with default settings for blending, worked pretty well in fully automatic mode. I just tell it the horizontal FOV is 5 degrees. With these full-frame images I would cut off the 100-200 pixels on the left and right so the massive vignetting doesn't confuse things (I usually shoot 1200x1200 images for mosaics but not everyone listens to me ) You can see some corner artifacts but not as bad as what you were getting.
Click to view attachment

BTW, I'm not sure how hugin/autopano-sift works, but when autostitch works, it's a lot faster and easier for casual use. Hugin's output image quality is better, though.

In the first pan that I posted, I established the control points manually (just to go through the exercise). I tried again with the sol 23 pan, allowing the Assistant to establish the control points. In this one, as with the one above, I told Hugin to crop the input images (I forget how much I cropped the sol 19 one, but in the sol 23 one I cropped 100 pixels from left and right sides and 50 from top and bottom). Here's what I got:
Click to view attachment
Just for giggles, I redid the stitch, but this time I did not crop the frames. The result is worse:
Click to view attachment
Okay, then, let's try cropping even more, 200 from left and right and 100 from top and bottom. I don't think the result improves over the first one. In fact, overlaying and differencing the two in Photoshop shows they're basically identical.
Click to view attachment
Help...

Here is another zip with the png, pto, and mk files for this one.
https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/emily/00...8000C0_DXXX.zip

I played with it some more and was unable to duplicate your results. There may be some subtlety with the order of the images or something. I'm also a bit confused about how the cropping works in hugin. If I were doing it I would pre-crop the images before hugin even sees them, just to be sure. Expecting it to sensibly handle the vignetted crap near/beyond the filter boundary is asking too much.

Sorry I can't be of more help, I'm no hugin expert.

I can't check your files as I'm at work but I have never used the crop function withing Hugin (it didn't exist when i started using it!), I always crop MSL images with imagemagik first.
Hugin handles lines of bright/dark pixels at the edge very badly, even the single column of pixels at the edge of MER images I replace with the column next to it to improve the blending dramatically.

Also if you are using the assitant make sure it is not trying too hard with the exposure settings, do this manually instead. In particular I don't optimse for camera response and I optimse for exposure first and *then* vignetting as doing them simultaneously can cause it to get carried away with the amount of vignetting to apply (which should be very small!)