Over the years my photographic attempts have become increasingly ambitious, and when we recently visited Grand Canyon, my man Arno and yours truly shot several gigs of HDR panoramas. If you've ever tried to compose such masterpieces yourself, you might have noticed that it's quite a time-consuming task. I therefore decided to speed things up by automating the process as far as possible. The result is a Perl script that can be run in any directory containing 3n images. It performs the following steps on these images:

• align the 3 exposures of each image using align_image_stack from the hugin project in case they're not completely congruent.
• combine the 3 exposures and perform the tone mapping using either Photomatix running in wine or Qtpfsgui. At present, Photomatix seems to have the better tone mapping algorithms.
• create control points for the panorama with autopano-sift.
• generate the final HDR panorama with hugin.

The EXIF data of the images is preserved during the whole workflow.

Please let me know if you've got any comments or improvments regarding this project.