Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: Ryan Mack on July 11, 2026, 03:26:13 pm
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I’m happy to announce that, 6 years after I started, I’ve released a 1.0 version of my free MergeRAW Lightroom Classic plugin that adds all the computational photography features your phone has but your DSLR or mirrorless doesn’t…
- Lower Base ISO for long exposures - If you want blurry waterfalls in daylight without an ND or cleaner shadows for a huge print, do frame averaging directly in Lightroom!
- Night Mode - Smart photo stacking… align and stack discarding any blurry frames… why should your Z8 need a tripod if your phone doesn’t?
- Pixel Shift - NX Studio is slow and has serious quality-impacting bugs… merge pixel shift sets directly in Lightroom and get the best quality possible.
- Multiple Exposures - In camera multi-exp records NEFs/CR3s but the output is only a JPEG… blend the raw files in LR and get the DNG you really wanted.
- Astro Landscape in LR - Automatic sky alignment and foreground masking with satellite and hot pixel removal, with or without dark frames.
And more… (hot pixel elimination, dark frame subtraction, flat field calibration, and PDAF banding fixes to name a few).
Let me know what you think!
https://mackman.net/mergeraw/
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Thanks Ryan!
I have downloaded your Plugin and will now start playing with it!
I am sure I will get back to you at some point.
William
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Sounds really interesting!
What goes wrong when using nikon's NX with pixelshift?
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Sounds really interesting!
What goes wrong when using nikon's NX with pixelshift?
I'll preface to say I tested this when it first came out but have not confirmed whether or not it was fixed in the last year.
It seemed like there was an off-by-one error in some of the maths that resulted in one or two color channels to be slightly rescaled compared to the third that introduced color halos on hard edges.
My app can detect when regions of the image are different between frames in excess of what would be expected due to noise and per-pixel variation and automatically avoid using multiple images there. That's something some cameras do in-camera but Nikon's software doesn't.
Last, for most lenses the aperture isn't precise and lighting is never perfectly constant. My app is the only one that does a precise exposure matching between frames before combining. Without that, you end up geting pattern noise across the entire image (checkerboard) that can easily reduce your dynamic range to 8-10 bits instead of the 12-14 you should get.
...and one more thing... my app is dramatically faster and outputs losslessly compressed DNGs using JPEGXL so the files are much smaller.
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Just had time to have a quick look at the plug-in and my first reaction is : Many Thanks!
Installation was a breeze on a mac and
I have a 10 core machine and Nikon-NX only used one to merge- so yes way faster! and seems to work really well.
Will come back at you after some more serious testing.
Pieter Kers
ps
do you think using Lightrooms (AI) enhance-photo is useful before the merging? for better quality?
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do you think using Lightrooms (AI) enhance-photo is useful before the merging? for better quality?
If you're using it to merge pixel shift then no, I wouldn't use AI enhancement. It's mostly trying to guess the information using AI that pixel shift actually records for real.
If you're talking about one of the other merge methods (sky tracking or focus stacking) then I would use AI enhancement after merging. That will meaningfully reduce noise in the output.