HDR for perfectionists :)

[torger]

I have a question about applying this to situations in which stitching is required.

The tonemapper would have to work on the whole image, it's required to make a proper analyze of it. What you can do is to merge the bracked shots to one in each position before stitching, as Lumariver HDR can do that without disturbing linearity of the original file, not sure if it will speed up your stitching workflow though.

If you want to tonemap the stitched file in Lumariver HDR you need lots of RAM as it holds the whole image in RAM and all associated layers in floating point representation.

Stitching is an interesting subject, I've done quite some stitching myself, I don't do much these days though, but I'm still very familiar with the techniques and challenges. Could be something to look into.

 

[danlindberg]

Something I would very much like to have for my interiors with ambient light and blown windows…..

Please make it work with Leaf Credo…..

Good going Torger, impressive stuff! :clap:

 

[dchew]

Ok first my disclaimer: As previously stated I am not an hdr expert by any means. I'm sure everyone familiar with either Ps HDR Pro or Photomatix could coax better results than I did. But maybe that is some of the point I'm going to make: How much learning curve is there with the hdr software? This was just a rough test, please don't think I would send anything remotely like any of these images to a client (this is a junk image anyway). There is a lot more work to do!

I can 'almost' get a reasonable image out of the lightest single frame, but the ceilings don't end up with enough detail. I bracketed 6 stops, most of which was for the lights in the ceiling (the darkest image is almost black except for the light fixtures themselves). Note this may be a unique situation vs landscape. It is also probably why all the software ended up with a dark rendering of the final image. Oh, these are IQ180 raw files...

Here are the lightest and darkest frames, no adjustments. There are no blacks in the light image and no pure whites in the dark image:

Here is what I did in each case:

HDR Pro:
I tried working on the raw files but they must be too big; I kept getting the dreaded "Error 54: Uncaught JavaScript exception: Error #". So then I rendered tiffs in C1 with an LCC applied. After bringing them into Ps I couldn't get rid of colored halos that appeared around the lights, so I gave up and just blended manually with a luminosity mask. In order to make the contrast and colors reasonable the ceilings started to blow out. I could not get a reasonable balance. Sorry too short on time (lazy?) to post those images now...

Photomatix:
Images went into C1 first to apply an LCC, so they were rendered tiffs that went into Photomatix. I used the "Indoors" setting which seemed to give me the best preview. After mapping and re-importing to Lightroom, I made the following adjustments after white balance:
Exposure +.35
Contrast -39
Shadows +35
Vibrance -9
Browns and reds were still way too strong so I went to the HSL panel and lowered Saturation:
Red -25
Orange -14

This is the result:

The chair is just awful:

And the wood bases:

Lumariver:
I opened the individual raw files straight into Lumariver and applied an LCC to each one on import (yay!!). I think everything was left to default, then saved out as a dng raw file back into Lightroom. After white balance, these are the LR adjustments:
Exposure +1.35
Shadows +76
Tone curve to lighten the image more

The Lumariver controls have the ability to lighten during the process, but I wanted to see what happened on default. Even though I pushed this pretty hard in Lightroom, there was still almost no noise! Here are the images:

Sooo much better!

Dave

 

[GlenC]

Hey Dave, thanks for your samples. The results from Lumariver look a lot better than Photomatix. Maybe I need to buy a mac and I just upgraded my pc

 

[dchew]

Hey Dave, thanks for your samples. The results from Lumariver look a lot better than Photomatix. Maybe I need to buy a mac and I just upgraded my pc

You're welcome, but again I'm new at all this; it is entirely possible I'm doing something wrong...

Dave

 

[drevil]

hi torger,

i installed your program but i am no able to import any image files, not my phase one raw files or tiff files will be loaded.

when i click on open, all image files are greyed out.

what am i doing wrong?

 

[Ed Hurst]

The tonemapper would have to work on the whole image, it's required to make a proper analyze of it. What you can do is to merge the bracked shots to one in each position before stitching, as Lumariver HDR can do that without disturbing linearity of the original file, not sure if it will speed up your stitching workflow though.

If you want to tonemap the stitched file in Lumariver HDR you need lots of RAM as it holds the whole image in RAM and all associated layers in floating point representation.

Stitching is an interesting subject, I've done quite some stitching myself, I don't do much these days though, but I'm still very familiar with the techniques and challenges. Could be something to look into.

Thanks so much for your reply! I am very impressed by what I am seeing about your software

Regarding your response, when you say "What you can do is to merge the bracked shots to one in each position before stitching", my concern (which may be unjustified) is that stitching such files together may not give a smooth result, since the HDR process is working with different degrees of light and dark in each position. Is this a valid concern? I guess I am assuming that the output of the HDR process will be influenced by the light/dark values in each position, leading to banding artefacts when stitched.

I think tonemapping the stitched files would clearly avoid such a risk (if indeed there is a risk of that happening). That would, of course, be working with processed files (not RAWs), so may reduce the quality a little. Also, can your software work in this way with Photoshop Large files, as my stitched files are often too big to be TIFFs? My machine has 32GB of RAM, so it might be able to cope

Best wishes,

Ed

 

[AndyPtak]

Another vote and promise of purchase for a Windows version.

 

[Sarnia]

hi torger,

i installed your program but i am no able to import any image files, not my phase one raw files or tiff files will be loaded.

when i click on open, all image files are greyed out.

what am i doing wrong?

Same experience here. :scry:

 

[dchew]

Same experience here. :scry:

You guys might be trying to open a file from the File menu. That looks for .lrhdr files. What you want to do instead is just go to File - New. Then click "add images." Then hunt for your image files.

Dave

 

[Sarnia]

You guys might be trying to open a file from the File menu. That looks for .lrhdr files. What you want to do instead is just go to File - New. Then click "add images." Then hunt for your image files.

Dave

Guilty as charged! Must take the time to try it properly.

Thanks.

 

[Jack]

Great thread, but I am going to move it the digital processing area -- I think it could have a larger appeal than just MF shooters! I will leave a redirect up in the MF forum for a few weeks.

 

[drevil]

maybe a bug i found, when i start the program or click "new" to get a new panel, the scroll bar is scrolled all the way down.

that was also the reason why i didnt see the add images button.

i have no retina screen, thats probably why

cheers

mirko

 

[tived]

Hej Svensker,

Windows version would make it appealing

all the best

Fra en Dansker

Henrik

 

[torger]

Please make it work with Leaf Credo…..

I hope we get native support eventually, meanwhile you can use DNG converter to make DNG out of the Credo IIQs, which then can be loaded into Lumariver HDR.

 

[torger]

hi torger,

i installed your program but i am no able to import any image files, not my phase one raw files or tiff files will be loaded.

when i click on open, all image files are greyed out.

what am i doing wrong?

We need to fix our gui a bit to make it a bit more user friendly on this. "Open" is for opening a Lumariver HDR project file, to load files you use the "Add file" button. Problem is that on small screens (laptops) the GUI get compressed and the "Add file" button scrolls out of sight. You can scroll the tool panel to see it, but it's not so obvious as the scrollbar autohides.

 

[torger]

Thanks so much for your reply! I am very impressed by what I am seeing about your software

Regarding your response, when you say "What you can do is to merge the bracked shots to one in each position before stitching", my concern (which may be unjustified) is that stitching such files together may not give a smooth result, since the HDR process is working with different degrees of light and dark in each position. Is this a valid concern? I guess I am assuming that the output of the HDR process will be influenced by the light/dark values in each position, leading to banding artefacts when stitched.

I think tonemapping the stitched files would clearly avoid such a risk (if indeed there is a risk of that happening). That would, of course, be working with processed files (not RAWs), so may reduce the quality a little. Also, can your software work in this way with Photoshop Large files, as my stitched files are often too big to be TIFFs? My machine has 32GB of RAM, so it might be able to cope

I have not tested HDR stitches so far and the questions are now so difficult I simply have to make a test case for it to find out . It *should* not have any problem as we've designed the software to keep original linearity if you doesn't change exposure/conrast inside the software.

We do not support PSD Large currently. There's currently a hard-limit of a maximum image size of 65535x65535 pixels (4 gigapixels) due to limits in some data structures, they are not too hard to overcome though, but to be worthwhile we would need an architecture that don't keep all data in RAM as it does now. It won't be a prioritized thing for us to start with.

 

[torger]

Ed, had to check how we actually do it: what you don't want to happen in stitching is that images are autoscaled in relation to the brightest spot in the stack, then you would get different brightness of the various stacks.

Lumariver HDR doesn't scale in the merging step, instead uses a fixed reference (in the tonemapping stage it does fit to the brightest spot though) so all your stacks will get the same reference brightness. The fixed reference is made such that the most brightest most saturated colors the camera can produce should not cause any clipping, so that we take care of all data*. This means that the reference will vary with white balance, so you should have the same white balance on all shots, or set a white balance on import.

One of the reasons we made Lumariver HDR was actually that I've lacked a HDR software that can merge stacks without altering the linearity of the original image. I didn't need it for stitching, but for reproduction work. If you save the merged result to raw output the raw file will have the exact same linearity as the original image, just less noisy. With raw output you can disregard from the white balance /clipping discussion above too, it won't matter, raw files remain in camera space.

The drawback of a fixed reference is that imported images and merge output will appear darker than normal, as the conservative reference usually leaves some headroom. As the data is floating point it doesn't matter for precision, but it's a bit less user-friendly. You can use the exposure slider to adjust. We'll probably make a auto-adjustment of the exposure slider or similar in a coming version to make it a bit user-friendlier.

*As most cameras can produce blue colors that's a tiny bit outside ProPhoto those actually can get clipped (Lumariver HDR uses prophoto as reference color space, just like DNG), but we're talking about 0.01 stops or so. Just knowing that it happens disturbs my desire for mathematical perfection though, so I might fix that in a future version

 

[Chris Barrett]

Man, I have been banging my head lately over HDR stuff. I have always used Photomatix to create a base for "the view" on my interiors with blown windows. Then I usually hand blend that into a nice exposure of the interior... but still I've never really been satisfied with my results. I'm starting post on a new project tomorrow and will give this a go!

CB

Edit: license purchasing results in a database error on your site

 

[torger]

Oops... we've just had a server upgrade so something obviously went wrong. Thanks for reporting! Looking into it as we speak...

Edit: now in should work again. Thanks for reporting and sorry for the inconvenience.