Pages: 1 ... 10 11 [12] 13 14 ... 16   Go Down

Author Topic: ZERO NOISE technique  (Read 412985 times)

Plekto

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 551
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #220 on: April 03, 2008, 08:20:42 pm »

Quote
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)

Quote
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.


Quote
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.

Quote
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....



Quote
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
« Last Edit: April 03, 2008, 08:28:35 pm by Plekto »
Logged

Guillermo Luijk

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2005
    • http://www.guillermoluijk.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #221 on: April 05, 2008, 03:40:03 pm »

Quote
Then I should do:

sRGB(gamma=1.0) -> XYZ
XYZ -> sRGB(gamma=2.2) ?

but if I am not missing something, in the end this means:
R' = R^(1/2.2)
G' = G^(1/2.2)
B' = B^(1/2.2)

which does not preserve the ratio between the colours, so tones change, don't they?

I am sorry for pushing up again this thread, but I did some checks to find out how the delinearization of a linear image happens in PS, and I am happy with the findings so I wanted to share.

1. I developed an image in DCRAW (linear output converted to sRGB)
2. I opened it into PS and converted it now to non-linear sRGB (PS should apply a 2.2 gamma)
3. I used a program I wrote some time ago that with Image 1 and Image 2 as input, calculates the RGB curves to go from Image 1 to Image 2. If the correspondence between both images is independent on each channel, the curve calculated will be exact to convert Image 1 into Image 2. Otherwhise it will just be an approximation.

Well, the curve calculated was this (see RED plot):


RED: PS application of gamma 2.2
BLUE: pure 2.2 gamma

Exactly the same for the 3 RGB channels. That means the proper way to apply gamma is the easiest possible! good news. Probably you were already telling me this guys, but It was not clear to me.

I then calculated a pure 2.2 gamma curve to check if the curve that PS applied is a perfect gamma:

R'=R^(1/2.2)
G'=G^(1/2.2)
B'=B^(1/2.2)

R,G,B normalised values [0..1]

And it is was plotted in BLUE colour in the previous graph. It's very close to what PS did, just PS seems to lift deep shadows a bit less than the pure gamma curve. But the approximation is very good so I will use those simple formulas in my program and with the maximum floating point precision, no matter if it's a bit slow.

To allow the user to choose to apply the gamma before the final TIFF file is generated is important to improve a lot the robustness in the shadows and the maximum achievable DR expansion, which now can be greater than 16 f-stops!


BR
« Last Edit: April 05, 2008, 06:50:38 pm by GLuijk »
Logged

cedricb

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 14
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #222 on: May 07, 2008, 10:44:06 am »

Hi GLijk,

I'm a Java/C software developer. I'm just wondering if you could send me the main source code? So I could write a tools which can be used on every platform. I've tried to use wine on Linux with no success...

Or if you want I could be at your service to produce a cross platform tools instead of your VB software...  I can be your dev monkey!  

Please let me know.

Regards,
Ced.
Logged

Guillermo Luijk

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2005
    • http://www.guillermoluijk.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #223 on: May 07, 2008, 09:41:22 pm »

hi cedricb, it seems some C developers have got a lot of interest in writing Zero Noise in a more proper way in a Spanish forum; I have encouraged them to forget about developing the input RAW files but to output a DNG 16-bit RAW file. Any help with the DNG format (we just need the needed routines from the DNG SDK to build a 16-bit DNG file from the partial RGGB data) is VERY WELCOME.

Moreover we plan to write first a GUI for DCRAW; not just another front end for it but a very technical RAW developer (with a philosophy close to Gabor's RAWnalyze) to really exploit DCRAW's capabilities so as some new features.
It will focus on:
- A very precise display of the image
- Total control of pure RAW development tasks not caring at all about those (curves, saturation,...) that are best done in PS
- Before/After comparision splits for any of the settings

A very basic approach of the GUI and functions could be:






If you know about DNG please let me know.

BR

PS: this is not related to the answer, but wanted to show how well DCRAW's highlight recovery performs with bright areas on skin. Left is the result using -H 2 (neutral) option, same result as with ACR/LR recovery routines. Right is the active tone emulation performed with -H 9 in DCRAW, not always works but here was fine (no PP at all in either of the recoveries):

« Last Edit: May 07, 2008, 09:49:21 pm by GLuijk »
Logged

MichaelEzra

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1146
    • https://www.michaelezra.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #224 on: May 08, 2008, 05:01:00 pm »

GLuijk, I just tested v 0.91 and it worked great! (I had some problems with v0.9 before)
Logged

dwdallam

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2044
    • http://www.dwdallam.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #225 on: May 09, 2008, 07:45:07 am »

It would be great if we see a PS plugin for this great tool. If you could do something like that, surely you could sell it to a software developer and retire. lol

Nice work.

I'll bet the ACR guru who works for Adobe is already on it as we speak. I mean, why not?
Logged

Guillermo Luijk

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2005
    • http://www.guillermoluijk.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #226 on: May 09, 2008, 10:57:53 am »

Quote
It would be great if we see a PS plugin for this great tool.

what would be the advantage of having this program in the form of a PS plugin? people not using PS could not enjoy it, and anyway would offer no advantages since it uses DCRAW for the RAW development.

Wayne Fox

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4237
    • waynefox.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #227 on: May 09, 2008, 03:40:49 pm »

Quote
what would be the advantage of having this program in the form of a PS plugin? people not using PS could not enjoy it, and anyway would offer no advantages since it uses DCRAW for the RAW development.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=194602\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I agree that doing it as a plugin only may not be ideal., but, I wish all RAW developers would offer a plugin option so I could work inside of bridge and photoshop.  I use ACR most of the time just because of the simplicity of the workflow.  If I could load C1 or some other RAW processing software as a plugin (or file format module) to operate like camera raw I would most likely try them, for now the workflow is just too easy with ACR that I default to that most of the time.
Logged

MichaelEzra

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1146
    • https://www.michaelezra.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #228 on: May 09, 2008, 08:48:06 pm »

I think the idea here is that Zero Noise could use some sort of plug-in architecture for use of different RAW converters, based on user's preference.

Another approach would be to have a raw output from Zero Noise, as was discussed before, and then any desired raw converter could be used:)
Logged

Andy M

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 333
    • http://
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #229 on: May 19, 2008, 03:37:04 pm »

Is the software available for Mac?
Logged

dwdallam

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2044
    • http://www.dwdallam.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #230 on: May 20, 2008, 03:22:19 am »

Quote
what would be the advantage of having this program in the form of a PS plugin? people not using PS could not enjoy it, and anyway would offer no advantages since it uses DCRAW for the RAW development.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=194602\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Why not both DCRAW and PS as a plugin?
Logged

Plekto

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 551
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #231 on: May 20, 2008, 01:48:16 pm »

Because Adobe does its own funky ting when it converts/imports data and then does more "tweaking" with it when you save it back.

It's much easier to just keep it as it is - a stand alone app that does one thing better than any of the multi-tasking ones out there.
Logged

dwdallam

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2044
    • http://www.dwdallam.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #232 on: May 21, 2008, 02:31:10 am »

Quote
Because Adobe does its own funky ting when it converts/imports data and then does more "tweaking" with it when you save it back.

It's much easier to just keep it as it is - a stand alone app that does one thing better than any of the multi-tasking ones out there.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=196817\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Ah ok. I was thinking something else. That's why someone asked if it could be coded to DNG output? If so, yeah that would be fine.
Logged

Plekto

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 551
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #233 on: May 21, 2008, 08:21:16 pm »

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=25484

Specifically this.  Yes, adding more options for output is always a good thing.(I'm not a fan of "Photoslop" as you might gather.
Logged

dwdallam

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2044
    • http://www.dwdallam.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #234 on: May 22, 2008, 03:15:11 am »

Quote
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=25484

Specifically this.  Yes, adding more options for output is always a good thing.(I'm not a fan of "Photoslop" as you might gather.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=197142\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I'm not a fan of any legalized monopoly, including Microsoft, Adobe, or Oil Companies, and Power distribution companies. I really do wish there were more options to both increase quality and to drive down price.
Logged

hassiman

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 156
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #235 on: May 26, 2008, 11:04:44 pm »

Hi,

Has anyone here tried the really graet ENFUSE GUI front end BRACKETEER which is great at extending dynamic range and reducting noise by blending bracketed exposures.    If so how does it compare with ZERO NOISE and where can I get ZERO NOISE for MAC?
Logged

Guillermo Luijk

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2005
    • http://www.guillermoluijk.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #236 on: May 27, 2008, 05:25:16 am »

Quote
where can I get ZERO NOISE for MAC?
Nowhere, but if you would like to write Zero Noise for Mac, I will share with you all the algorithms.

Zero Noise is very demanding with correct image alignment, but regarding noise is very optimised, I would dare to say that noise cannot be reduced more than Zero Noise does. This is not because Zero Noise is wonderfully coded, just because of the way it works, selecting individually the less noisy pixels.
« Last Edit: May 27, 2008, 05:25:28 am by GLuijk »
Logged

cedricb

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 14
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #237 on: June 03, 2008, 02:57:36 am »

GLuijk,

Can you post the link of the Spanish forum so I can have a look at the ZN rewrite.


Regards,
Ced.
Logged

Guillermo Luijk

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2005
    • http://www.guillermoluijk.com
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #238 on: June 03, 2008, 05:51:18 am »

Quote
Can you post the link of the Spanish forum so I can have a look at the ZN rewrite.

There is no ZN rewrite yet, we are designing first our own RAW developer: Perfect RAW.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2008, 05:51:59 am by GLuijk »
Logged

cedricb

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 14
ZERO NOISE technique
« Reply #239 on: June 04, 2008, 07:45:58 am »

I would like to use your ZN technique on Linux and for the time been there is no image editor which handles 16bits images (GIMP will do that in the future).

I don't really need a GUI to merge a set of RAW (I'll do with the default camera WB), so could you share your code for the exposure calculation and the blending?
I'm just wondering I can do the same thing (for the time been) with ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php) and dcraw... Linux/Mac/Windows users should be able to use it...

With ImageMagick, you can blend two images with a percentage ratio (http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/compose/#blend)
« Last Edit: June 04, 2008, 07:56:26 am by cedricb »
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 10 11 [12] 13 14 ... 16   Go Up