Welcome to the real world, Neo. Digital has obviously come a long way since you used it last;
2 images is more than adequate in the majority of cases, and the more images you have the greater problems you have with alignment. And add a zero or two to your estimate of card capacity; the larger cards available can hold hundreds of RAW frames, possibly over 1000.
Dang. I must have chosen the wrong color...
Yes I know about the capacities, too. But even if you had to hold a 100MB raw file from a digital back, you could fit a ton of them on a single card these days. Of course, this all isn't cheap.
I want the multiple exposures as an option for scenery and the like. Setting it on the camera and then messing with this free software... beautiful results when you want it to look like film. (I've even seen focus blending - which is also amazing)
Film does not lend itself to DR blending as well as digital. Film has a non-linear response curve, which makes calculating the correct blend values accurately much harder. And if the film isn't perfectly flat when exposed and scanned, aligning multiple frames to blend becomes problematic.
I figured as much for the film. I'd obviously need software to automate the process so that I don't have to touch anything. But it also seems to be possible, and a cheaper alternative than digital MF backs.
As far as I know, they don't seem to differ too much between units of the same model: I have tested saturated RAW files from two 40D's and both saturated exactly at the same level (13000 something).
Nice to know.
If you mean in the sitting room sample, my Canon 350D.
The present version of the program allows for up to 10 RAW files (autolimited, I thought more is simply stupid) and they don't need to be ordered. The program will order them by exposure level and calculate (not read the EXIF) the relative exposure between each pair of images. If the program allowed the user to enter the EV differences between the shots, the result would probably be wrong and transitions would become visible due to exposure differences.
Very slick. Just drop in and it figures it out. Very good. Yeah, that is easier than my idea. Pay no attention to my ramblings... these are not the droids you are looking for....
Digital cameras have become really nice devices Plekto. Their Aquiles heel today is DR and they are continuously improving. With this technique you can avoid the limitations in DR, but with the important limitation that it requires a tripod and a static scene.
This I can probably deal with as the shots that I care about are exactly that sort of thing. Some house or car or sunset whatnot that looks dreadful because of the shadows and the wide swaths of nearly continuous tones - often with the sun bouncing off of something or in the distance.
It does look like 3-5 exposures are needed, though, for best results. Adding that third midrange shot cleaned up the middle tones quite considerably. If you notice, 95% of the pictures that we enlarge or want to be large enough where this matters tend to be static pictures.
I'm now looking for a camera that can do quick bracketing like this - so I don't have to mess too much. But few seem set up for this - either they are limited to single steps instead of +/-2 or they only go to +/- 2 maximum(too limited), or can only do three shots.
But I'll find something, I'm sure Being able to have it fire off 5 shots under in a second would make it much easier as alignment wouldn't be an issue(ie - I wouldn't touch it at all to change settings). Just press the remote shutter release button(this is a good use for them - who would have thought... )and presto - I can blend 2 or 3 or 5 as it requires. Then dump it into Photoshop or whatnot to get it ready to print.
Oh - I did have one other suggestion - one that I think you could actually charge money for if you put it in the program(I'd pay money for this):
- Have an option to automate the process. Save a set of settings and that way you could tell it to process every three in a folder at a time or some other method. Possibly by photo number if the camera names them as xxxA, xxxB, etc. I don't know how to do this, but I suspect it wouldn't be so difficult.
Set it up - drop all of your multi-exposure pictures in the input folder, it spits out blended images to the output folder. Come back after getting lunch and all of them are done. Like your own automated mini-lab
