Can I align two photos using manually selected control points?
Asked 1/26/2014
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I have two photos of the same location taken under different weather conditions, so automatic alignment may not work well. Can I manually choose matching control points—such as building corners, streetlights, or road markings—and have software align the rest of the image based on those points?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
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Yes. You can do this quite easily in Hugin, a popular open source Guide tool for panorama creation and other image alignment tasks. You can read about the details in the corresponding page of the manual, but it really just comes down to going to the control points tab and adding them by clicking. (There's no special trick to it; it's part of the program's basic functionality.) As the docs suggest, you should have at least three points per image for basic corrections, and more for more complicated ones.
You also might try automatic point selection; depending on the images, it may work better than you expect.
Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1943
12y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes. This is a standard feature in image-alignment and panorama software.
One option is Hugin, which lets you manually add control points by clicking matching features in both images. The software then uses those points to calculate the alignment for the rest of the image.
As a rule of thumb, use at least three matching points for basic alignment, and add more if the images differ more significantly or need more complex correction.
Even if the scenes were shot in different weather, it may still be worth trying automatic control-point detection first, since it can sometimes work better than expected. If not, manual points are the right approach.
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