Photo Panorama, HDR & Stitching

Multi-image composites — stitched panoramas, exposure blends, HDR tone maps. Most modern raw developers in Photo RAW Editors include basic pano + HDR merge; the dedicated tools below shine when you need 100+ MP gigapixels, fish-eye unrolls, or careful exposure fusion. For browser-side compositing see Image Editing.

Panorama stitching (free / OSS)

• ★ Hugin — GPL, cross-platform. The canonical OSS pano tool; powerful control-point editor, projection math, lens correction, exposure equalization. Steeper learning curve than commercial tools but stitches anything: spherical, cylindrical, rectilinear, fish-eye unrolls, gigapixels.
• ★ enblend / enfuse — GPL CLI tools that ship with Hugin; multi-resolution seam blending (enblend) and exposure fusion (enfuse). Hugin uses them under the hood; you can also call them directly for batch work.
• Panorama Tools (libpano13 / PTBatcher) — the underlying engine that Hugin and PTGui both descend from.
• OpenPano, Pannellum — the latter is for displaying 360 panos in the browser, not stitching.

Panorama stitching (paid / commercial)

• ★ PTGui — paid (perpetual). The pro panorama tool; faster, friendlier UI than Hugin, mask-based ghost removal, viewpoint correction. Studio default for architectural / real estate panos.
• AutoPano Giga (Kolor, discontinued by GoPro in 2018) — still works on legacy Win installs; no future.
• Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) — free, Windows, "research" status (no longer downloadable from MS, mirrors exist). Surprisingly good for casual stitching.
• Lightroom Classic Photo Merge → Panorama — included with Lightroom; good enough for most travel panos.
• Capture One Panorama Stitch — included; competent.
• Adobe Photoshop Photomerge — included with Photoshop; stronger than Lightroom's for tricky cases.
• Affinity Photo Panorama — paid one-time; built into Affinity.

HDR (free / OSS)

• ★ Luminance HDR (formerly Qtpfsgui) — GPL, cross-platform. The OSS HDR app; reads bracketed raws, exposure-fuses or tone-maps with classic operators (Reinhard, Drago, Mantiuk, Fattal). Less polished than commercial tools but free.
• enfuse — exposure fusion CLI; pairs naturally with bracketed exposures from a tripod. Often better than tone-mapped HDR for a natural look.
• darktable — see Photo RAW Editors; has an HDR / exposure fusion module built in.
• RawTherapee — same; built-in HDR tone mapping.
• GIMP exposure blending — manual layer-based; works.

HDR (paid / commercial)

• ★ Photomatix Pro (HDRsoft) — paid perpetual. The long-running HDR tool; tone-mapping presets are the look people associate with "HDR photography." Polarizing aesthetic; still a daily driver for real-estate shooters.
• Aurora HDR (Skylum) — paid; AI-leaning HDR. Skylum's marketing is heavy; results are decent.
• Lightroom Classic Photo Merge → HDR — included; produces a 32-bit floating-point DNG. Conservative-looking output, often the right call.
• Affinity Photo HDR Merge — paid one-time; built in.
• HDR Efex Pro (Nik Collection by DxO) — paid; bundled with the rest of the Nik plug-ins.

Specialty workflows

• Hyperlapse / motion panos — Hugin handles temporally-shifted frames.
• Real-estate verticals — PTGui or Hugin for vertical stitches without ceiling distortion.
• Gigapixel composites — Hugin scales to 100+ source frames; PTGui handles them faster.
• 360 / VR panos — Hugin or PTGui can output equirectangular; pair with Pannellum or Marzipano for web display.
• Drone panos — most drones write a panorama JSON sidecar; Lightroom reads DJI's; Hugin always works.

What's changing in 2024–2026

• In-camera computational pano — iPhone / Pixel / Galaxy now produce excellent panos at capture; multi-frame dedicated tools mostly matter for tripod / drone / pro work.
• AI stitching — newer PTGui releases include ML alignment; Hugin still control-point-based.
• HDR fade-out — the over-cooked HDR look is past peak; modern raw developers' built-in highlight/shadow recovery covers most needs without a dedicated HDR tool.

Pick this if…

• Default OSS panorama: Hugin (with enblend / enfuse).
• Pro pano work, money no object: PTGui.
• Quick travel pano, already in Lightroom: Lightroom Photo Merge.
• OSS HDR / tone-mapping: Luminance HDR or darktable.
• Real-estate HDR look: Photomatix Pro.
• Natural-looking exposure blend (no HDR aesthetic): enfuse on bracketed raws.
• For astrophotography stacking: see your astronomy tools (Siril, DeepSkyStacker) — different workflow from terrestrial pano/HDR.