You do need a way to manually enter the saturation point of a camera, since I suspect that each camera is a tiny bit different as well due to manufacturing and optical changes.(perhaps slightly different with each lens, even, though I suspect it's a very small value)
Lens does not affect camera's saturation point. I am planning to introduce a 'Calibrate' button, so just by providing ZN a saturated picture it would calculate the exact saturation point to optimise RAW dvelopment for each particular camera.
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).
Q: what camera was used? It's impressive to say the least.
If you mean in the sitting room sample, my Canon 350D.
Q2:Could you possibly change it to have "slots" that you put the files into, and then you can select which one is what value? (so it knows what order to properly blend everything if you have lots of pictures) That way you could have 3 or 4 or even 12 exposures to blend together.(why not, digital "film" is not a factor here - most cards will hold 10-12 raw pictures)
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.
This has honestly made me reconsider whether I should be looking at digital or not.
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.
Jonathan, I remember you would be interested in a blending with a 16-bit DNG output. Many people have shown a lot of interest for this option. To do that is no problem as long as we know how to build a DNG from scratch, so
anyone who knows about the DNG format and would like to make a pure RAW blending tool, just contact me. I think it is not that difficult.
However, in such an approach, it would be a must to have the possibility for anti-ghosting and allow progressive blending in the border areas, since the result will be difficult to correct making use of the original RAW files. I want to try mi anti-ghosting and progressive blending ideas in the next weeks.