There’s a very nice guy named Steve Cohen volunteering at the AMNH as a fossil explainer. Steve stumbled across this blog and offered to take some pictures of AMNH stuff for me. Obviously, I said ‘no thanks’….
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AS IF!!!!!
I said yes, thankyouverymuch indeed, PLEASE take some pictures. First off, Steve got me some very nice pictures of the AMNH hadrosaur mummy, and then he took shots of the Tyrannosaurus rex mount to make a panorama. Steve used autostitch, for good effect:
A very nice picture, with only a few minor flaws: the coracoids are blurry, and there are a few decidedly odd-looking people in front. I asked Steve for the original 30 photos from which he stitched this panorama, then tossed them into hugin and ran the automatic alignment option. Here’s what I got:
a bit better, because the people aren’t cut to pieces. No, I went for modest manual input: I used masks to hide the people, and I deselected photos of inferior quality. Not for the alignment, but only for the panorama creation. That means that their overlap with other photos is used to position the photos, but that their blurry content is not added to the merged picture. Here’s the result of maybe 4 minutes of effort:
Not that much difference, because autostitch did a good job on its own. Still, this shows that a tiny amount of work can easily improve a panorama. If there had been alignment issues, there would have been no way to fix them but using hugin.
dinosaurpalaeo 
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here, in that any automated process is never perfect. As demonstrated tweaking is nearly alway necessary after processing.
I’ve had some success with using Photoshop’s inbuilt panorama tool and posted some examples on my blog back in January:
http://paleoillustrata.blogspot.de/2012/01/palaeontology-panoramas-bigger-picture.html
Of course landscapes are far easier to stitch than scenes containing artificial structures which invariably have straight edges and precise angles to deal with, and the human eye spots any processing flaws very easily.
Edit: link was dead for some odd reason, trying again. H.
Stu, I saw that post (and your recent photogrammetry post), but Blogger keeps me from commenting 😦
I’ve found that some automations work very well (i.e., no tweaking) for certain situations, e.g., for landscape panoramas with ideally suited individual photos. Aside from that, yes, spending a few moments tweaking is really a good idea.