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Author Topic: HDRi and Stitching in Photoshop CS3/CS4 ???  (Read 4002 times)

sanfairyanne

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HDRi and Stitching in Photoshop CS3/CS4 ???
« on: February 04, 2009, 04:37:47 pm »

Having recently been given a 5d I'm something of a complete novice but I've done some stitch work in CS3. I noticed under ''Automate'' in CS3 there's an option to use HDR, not knowing a thing about this I did some research and found it very interesting. HDR would appear to do away entirely with the need for graduated neutral density filters.
I wonder whether it's possibly to stitch images as well as combine HDR. I realise that for say a 3 image stitch you would also need to bracket a stop either side (or more) for each image. So your going to be needing masses of storage. Nine images in RAW (with a Jpeg fine) on a 5d would just about fill a third of a 512mb card.

Anyone had any experience of stitching HDR?


Thanks
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markhout

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HDRi and Stitching in Photoshop CS3/CS4 ???
« Reply #1 on: February 04, 2009, 04:39:57 pm »

See my reply here.

Mark
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bill t.

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HDRi and Stitching in Photoshop CS3/CS4 ???
« Reply #2 on: February 04, 2009, 08:09:51 pm »

Many of the stitching program like PTGui and PTAssembler can automatically handle both stitching and HDR processing at the same time.  You just submit all your images, and they even figure out which images constitute HDR sets.  Most of the time.

However, for best quality you should try Photomatix Pro 3's batch processing for all your HDR sets, then take the output .tifs from that and stitch them in say PTGui.  The Photomatix HDR processing is still somewhat better than in the other programs, although that is rapidly changing.

Um, 3 panels by 3 HDR stacks for a stitch is nothing!    With 25% overlap that's still only about 40 to 48 megapixels or so.  I routinely fill up 8gb CF's with the images for one to three HDR panos.  If it weren't for batch processing in Photomatix I'd be out of business.  Get big hard drives too, and don't forget to buy them in pairs so you can stay backed up.

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bill t.

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HDRi and Stitching in Photoshop CS3/CS4 ???
« Reply #3 on: February 05, 2009, 01:51:22 am »

Quote from: sanfairyanne
Bill I take it you mean this from a professional point of view. For someone who only just discovered HDR I imagine I could use CS4 with excellent results, at least to my inexperienced eye.
Yes.

I ran a couple panos using CS4 and it was definitely an improvement over CS3.  The one thing that PTGui and the others still do more elegantly is correct for perspective and rotation, sort of like we used to do with view cameras.  On PTGui's preview screen you can make those corrections very easily with the mouse of numeric input.  Of course those corrections can be made after the stitch with CS4's transform functions, but somehow I like to be able to do them pre-stitch.  But mainly there is no control point editing in CS4 (I think) which really needs to be done particularly when the number of combined frames is high or when there was a lot of wind or moving objects when the exposures were made.  Also CS4 still fails to correctly place monolithic panels such as sky-only images.  PTGui has the same problem, but it is easier to manually place frames like that in PTGui than in CS4.

OTOH, CS4's blending function is superb, I use it in preference to the previous blending champs Smartblend and Enblend.  (Smartblend is still the champ for severely misaligned originals, but I always shoot from a tripod with a pano head, so I don't need that).
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