Henk / Boomslang - Hear hear!
David - On Thursday, May 15, 2014 3:39:52 AM UTC-4, GnomeNomad wrote: > > > You have lots of knowledge in a narrow specialty. > > And yet my grandmother, to the day she died, swore I was going to electrocute myself when changing a lightbulb if the switch was still on. But in all seriousness, how many other ways are you going to find to call people stupid and inadequate in this thread? The only reason I've entered this discussion at all is that following Hugues' admittedly not-terribly-helpful post, the universal response from the community was what we might call the Apple playbook: blame the user. You didn't take time to get to know the software. You must not understand what's going on. You're holding it wrong. You're not computer savvy enough. You are just part of the point and shoot crowd that wants a one click solution. You should be using Linux instead of Windoze. Etc. Joergen's point, and mine as well, is that you can have a very good knowledge of what's going on under the hood, be very proficient technologically and photographically, and still have a difficult time getting good results with Hugin. It crashes far too often. It produces outputs with black patches where image stacks should be (even in Linux). It gets stuck in an optimization loop for 3 hours. And the like. These are not problems with the user; they are problems with the program. And yes, as I have already said, maybe I am using the program in ways that the average user doesn't - but I'm using it for functionality it *claims* to have, and I'm using it to try to stitch the types of panoramas I want to shoot. Is your next move to say I should be shooting non-stacked, non-HDR images? > I think that might depend on the software ... There are statistical > analysis packages out there that most certainly require extensive > education in statistics to be used with any degree of correctness. > > I'm going to be pedantic and push back here a bit. I agree that the "average person" might have a hard time *finding some legitimate reason to use or need to use *a package like R or Matlab. But in terms of actually *using* the software to accomplish a specific task they are set (say, loading and displaying a TIF file in Matlab), my general belief is that most people, even those without a great deal of technical knowledge, could follow a fairly simple tutorial. I would agree that it requires some technical skill to, for instance, receive a problem like "find the frequency spectrum of this dataset" and then go generate the code to solve the problem in a computational software package. But at that point we aren't talking about *using the software*, but rather possessing the knowledge to solve a problem. If we want to use your analogy, we might consider a Matlab clones like Octave for Freemat, and compare them to Hugin. In the context of this thread, it would be like Octave crashing on 20% of the Matlab scripts I ran (both claim "close to 100% Matlab code compatibility), or if a subset of the matrix functions in Freemat produced matrices with all zeros, instead of the correct results. In such a case, it wouldn't be my input scripts or the technical skill of the user (except possibly to be able to identify the problems), it would be the program itself which was to blame. And so is the case here - if an even somewhat skilled user is able to, in relatively short order, produce an acceptable panorama from a set of images in two other packages, and has a large amount of difficulty producing any panorama at all in Hugin, then at some point it seems reasonable to conclude that it might not be a problem with the user, and it might not be a problem with the images; it might be a shortcoming of the software. Again, the developers deserve to be thanked for the work they do. Their efforts make computational photography possible for a group of people who otherwise wouldn't have access to it. At the same time, users should not be blamed when they can't get Hugin to work, or experience bugs, crashes, and strange output. Hugin seems to work well for many people, but it certainly is not perfect. Pretending that it is doesn't serve anyone's interests. -- A list of frequently asked questions is available at: http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_FAQ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hugin and other free panoramic software" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hugin-ptx/a1f3444f-8a76-47b9-8ef8-cb39b6842034%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
