I want to combine three exposure bracketed CR2 raw files into a single PNG or Tiff fie and I am wondering if this is possible with Huggin. I have actually loaded the three images into Huggin, put them into a single stack the aligned all three images the resulting image on the screen looks great for what I want as I have nice details from highlights to shadows. But I can’t work out how to export a tiff from this stage.
EDIT: I should mention these are handheld shots so alignment is needed as well as exposure merge.
I am also learning exposure bracketing. I also used Hugin. It helps me to align and create a HDR image. After getting all the control points, I use assistant to align and create panorama…I am not an expert.
In another case, I also used GIMP to stack them. It’s also a very good tool but I still need to learn the best way to align the photos esp when I handheld the camera.
Thanks for the replies here. I tried for many hours to get Huggin to do a nice HDR of three bracketed exposures and took on advice from @Karl here. Sadly it was a frustrating experience. The UI is very challenging on a good day and not so easy when things are not working well.
In the end I abandoned the idea of HDR on the images in question. Instead I opened the darkest image in darktable and used base curve fusion to extract the best shadow details. This ultimately produced a better result than a HDR merge.
I even stooped so low as to try my LR6 Adobe software for HDR. Hmmm…Darktable wins with base curve fusion still from a single image.
In my alternative fantasy universe there is a Darktable developer who designs a module to align and merge raw files within Darktable. But I am not putting a feature request in just because I would like it and am unwilling to pay for a commercial product to do the very rare HDR that I want.
That’s my go-to method for pretty much any HDR scene, although I don’t use basecurve… Mind sharing a RAW + xmp? I’d like to see how you do it, as I haven’t heard of this method before.
I own an EasyHDR license, but I haven’t used that program in years… The results were better that any other HDR software that I’ve tried, but honestly, an underexposed RAW still beats it by quite a bit, plus I’ve got full control of the tone rendering and don’t have to worry about ghosting and such.
I’m curious about what can AEB in the D7500 can do though, I’d guess (haven’t looked it up yet) that it can produce an HDR JPEG too, not just the individual shots?
Here is one image with the base curve method to recover dark shadows. It is part of a series for panorama stitching. Japan-0043.CR3.xmp (12.7 KB) Japan-0043.CR3 (41.7 MB)
I think that modern cameras have quite some dynamic range to work with and get pleasing results if you like the result to be on the more natural side of things. Many times I’ve played with HDR rendering from bracketed shots (using HDRmerge, Luminance HDR, Hugin…) but almost every time I preferred the result I got from carefully developing one single shot and using the shadow/highlight recovering tools from the RAW developing software.
That is my experience with Hugin, too. So much so that I only use the command-line align_image_stack dot exe for that kind of work and then over to GIMP layers for blending.
oops, this more or less duplicates what I said earlier, so I’ve deleted the earlier one.
The GUI IS somewhat challenging. The results are good, but I miss control on HDR blending. Unfortunately I haven’t found any other really good alternative on Linux. The next best other solution is HDR merge, but I think it is a dead project.
I have a PTGUI License for panos. The tool is incredible and lightning fast. There is as well a Pro version, which should do exposure fusion as well. But I haven’t yet tested how much control I have there and the upgrade price is quite high, when you don’t use exposure blends very often.
There is one single program I need Windows for and that is Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (ICE). It is the best panorama stitching program I have every used. I would recommend it to any Windows user and its free. Sadly not FOSS. It can stitch RAW files even from my CR3 files but it only then gives out an 8 Bit Tiff. I prefer 16 Bit Tiffs so I feed PNG edits from DT into ICE to get a 16 bit Tiff out the other side.
Talking about pano programs: There are good pano programs on Linux. PTGUI is in my opinion THE Pano Programm which beats all others with ease, not only on Linux. It’s not cheap, though. Anyway, maybe I should invest some money for the upgrade, to see if it works as great on HDR as it does on panos.
If it has to be free ( without a price) have a look for Autopano Giga. It was abandoned and they have decided to give it away for free when they abandoned it. I already posted a link somewhere on this forum.
If it has to be free (as in FOSS):
There is Hugin, as already mentioned, a bit complex but quite mighty.
And there is XPano. Quite the oposite to Hugin. VERY easy to use. The results are good, but you have not too much control - I think on a similar level to ICE.
ICE isn’t comparable to Autopano Giga and certainly not to PTGUI. They play in a complete different league.
Except for picking control points ICE gives a lot of control. You can correct curved horizons and can rotate the angle of view and of course pick different models for stitching. There are very few images that it lets me down. And it is FAST.
Joke aside
It’s been a while that I had a look at ICE, so maybe it has more features in the meantime. But I’m on Linux, and prefer to have native programs. If you don’t mind, that’s up to you.
I’ve tried the guide from @paperdigits , and it worked perfectly – thanks, Mica! Merged from 3 frames (I should have denoised and been more careful not to sharpen the noise):
Thanks @kofa this guide looks very informative and promising. I will give it a go again using this guide. Mica has done a great job putting this guide together. Thanks @paperdigits for this. I really like written documentation and guides to follow. I did search the Huggin user guide and follow its instructions but with little luck.
