Whilst reading the Moose's musings I decided to follow the link to the
CHDK site for hacking Canyon point & shoot digitals. Just out of
curiosity since I don't own such an animal. I'm glad I did because near
the bottom of the page are links to freeware for stacking images for
focus and exposure addition as well as high dynamic range processing. I
haven't tried the stacking stuff but I did try the HDR (or DRI) stuff
and came away impressed.
Before we sold out Boston area house I had taken a lot of photos of the
interior to make up a sales brochure and web page. The day I took the
shots the sun was brilliantly streaming in some of the windows and
creating an extreme brightness range. I took a bunch of shots of each
and later on manually combined them in PhotoShop 7 using layers and
masking... extremely tedious with so-so results. Later on, after I got
PS CS3 I tried the HDR tool with the same set of images and produced
something a bit better with less effort but I haven't exactly been
inspired to go make more HDR images with PS CS3.
Now I've tried the Traumflieger-DRI-Tool (freeware from Germany)
<http://www.traumflieger.de/desktop/DRI/dri_tool.php#downlaod>
and I'm impressed. And you don't really need to understand German
either even though there is no English version of anything. You
download the app directly to whatever folder you'd like to have it in.
It is a standalone executable with no Windows installation procedure.
After downloading it just click on the executable and it's instantly up
and running with a single interface button labeled "START". The start
button brings up a file dialog window where you go select the two or
more HDR images you'd like to combine. They can be JPEG or TIFF. With
no fuss or fanfare you see the images load and instantly get combined
until the window just holds the output image. At that point another
file dialog opens wanting to know where to save the image which is only
saved as a TIFF file. You can also cancel the save and push the START
button again for another go with a different image combination. It's
pretty fast so these experiments are fairly painless.
My original exposure set was 7 shots spaced 1 stop apart. I did a
couple of experiments using all of the files then every other file and
finally just two files that were 3 or 4 stops apart which gave me the
best looking result. But the highlights were still a bit too bright and
the shadows a bit too dark. But a quick run of the output TIFF file
through Adobe Camera Raw and some adjustment of the highlight recovery
and shadow sliders brought everything into good range. No doubt this
can be done even better with some more experimentation (I had to push
the recovery slider to its full travel) but I was greatly impressed that
I had bettered all of my previous effort with just a couple minutes
work. Recommended.
Incidentally, the output file is a 16-bit TIFF so I assume I could have
fed it 16-bit TIFF's as input instead of JPEG's and gotten a better
tonal distribution in the output. I also just realized that I had been
feeding it 4 MP JPEG's instead of 13 MP JPEGS even though all were from
the 5D. I guess I cut them down somewhere along the way since they were
only to be used to make web images and small prints for a brochure. So
maybe it's not as fast as first appeared but it was pretty quick on
those smaller images.
Chuck Norcutt
AG Schnozz wrote:
> I figured everybody here is automatically tuning into "Moose Monday",
> but I wanted to give a special promotion to it this week. Moose is
> firing on all cylinders this week. If he keeps this up, we'll have to
> keep him around. :)
>
> www.zone-10.com
>
> BTW, the gallery software is currently being rehashed a little bit.
> Please bear with our dust. We're also in the midst of getting on a
> new server, so some stuff may appear or disappear.
>
> AG
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