If you are into HDR photography and use Ubuntu Linux, you may well find yourself wanting to install the catchily-named Qtpfsgui application. This is easy enough:

That gets you a full-featured HDR construction and tone-mapping toolkit. When you first try to build an HDR image from multiple LDR images, you’ll see an option to align images using hugin’s align_image_stack:

This utility is not available in any of the stable releases of hugin at the time of writing. There are instructions on compiling align_image_stack from source, but this does not cover the large number of dependencies that cmake and hugin drive.

Never fear: I have already jumped through all the hoops for you, ensuring that within a couple of hours of writing this, a new version of hugin including align_image_stack will be made available. Here’s what you need to do, for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron LTS):

This process takes a surprisingly long time: the utility depends on much of the hugin code. Once finished, fire up qtpfsgui once again, and you should be able to use align_image_stack to align those slightly misaligned source images. Anecdotal evidence suggests that you may get more reliable results running it from the command line, then opening the resultant HDR file in qtpfsgui.

If it still doesn’t work for you, you could try hdrprep instead. Please comment on your experiences with either method!