Hugin

Before you start stitching photos together, to create a panorama, you should look for a specialized application, because you will definitely find something that will relieve you from hours of continuous work. An excellent choice is Hugin, due to its advanced capabilities. It can align and stitch your photos automatically, but it still provides enough controls, to allow you to make the fines tweaks to your panoramas. What's more, Hugin is distributed as a freeware and cross-platform application.

It is sufficient to load your pictures and click a button to align them, after which you can save the actual panorama, but you can make numerous tweaks along the way. Once you load your pictures, you will be able to preview your panorama, on the application's user interface. At first, Hugin will simply display the loaded images together in the same preview area. Before aligning the pictures, you can choose from a wide variety of lens types, from normal to fish-eye.

In addition, Hugin places various customization controls at your disposal, which are neatly organized on separate tabs. You can scale your pictures, change their blending mode, set up different projection methods, crop the panorama and more. It is also possible to move and manipulate individual images in the preview area.

Working with Hugin is quite easy, but it does not mean that it limits you only to a handful of functions. The application allows you to switch to an expert mode at any time, which involves a different user interface, with more controls. The available options allow you to group your photos by their EXIF data or by other criteria, work with masks and control points and make numerous fine tweaks to the stitching feature. Even if these procedures sound complicated, you can find many useful tutorials on Hugin's official website.