On 22 Mrz., 17:53, Erik Krause <[email protected]> wrote: > Well, this is the technical view. From a photographers view enfuse > allows to preserve local contrast while it lowers global contrast. It > does this by the technical means you describe (which I understand pretty > well) and additionally - and thats the trick - by multi resolution > blending. It's the latter which preserves local contrast. If you simply > take the best exposed pixels from each shot, you get a very strange > looking image. > See:>http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/~tmertens/papers/exposure_fusion_redu... > > (See the "Naive" in Figure 4)
Thank you for the link to this article. I simply wasn't aware that enfuse also uses multi-resolution blending - I thought only enblend did this. No wonder the results are as good as they are. I have played with half-manual exposure fusion with the gimp (I think there was a plugin, and you could tweak the masks manually) - the technique was quite similar to what you describe with photoshop, but I was never quite convinced by it, comparing it to enfuse's result, which was available already at the time. So I fully agee if you say that > enfuse was a big step > forward, probably the biggest since invention of the digital camera > because it preserves the local contrast from each exposure bracket and > puts it into a result image which looks believable - other than many HDR > tonemapping approaches. But you state that > However, to use the medium dynamic range (8-10 > f-stops) from a single raw shot it's not essential. Good results can be > achieved with easier techniques. I think that the technique of having two versions of a RAW (usually that's enough for the effect) and enfusing them is a simple technique and the results are really nice. If you could make that into a one- step process eliminating the intermediate images, I think this would be very helpful. But maybe you can enlighten me also as to what you'd propse as an easier technique! My sensor produces 14bit images (I think it does) which is certainly well above anything a monitor can display, so some dynamic range compression is needed. I'm convinced that enfuse-like techniques produce superior results to HDR tonemapping with less effort, but if you know of an even simpler method that does the trick, please let me know. My eternal problem is the sky and particularly clouds (I do landscapes). I aim to do an exposure so that nothing at all is overexposed if I can avoid it - sometimes allowing some leeway for clouds, and of course for the sun itself if it's in my picture. If I do that with 100 ISO (the lowest my camera can do) the dark areas will usually be okay noise-wise and have enough dynamic range to produce detail. If not, I do a second shot, but it's nice to get away with one. Of course exposing like this will often leave the image too dark all over. But if I use the single RAW to make one version where the sky is fine and another where the rest looks good and enfuse them, I often come up with a result that's just fine, and I just don't get the same convincing look otherwise. Kay -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Hugin and other free panoramic software" group. A list of frequently asked questions is available at: http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_FAQ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx
