Car at sunrise - Bracketed shots

Tried out bracketing for some sunrise shots. Do I use Hugin to merge into hdr, or is there any other tool?

20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3542.nef (27.9 MB) 20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3543.nef (25.8 MB) 20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3544.nef (26.7 MB) 20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3545.nef (29.2 MB) 20201122_07.16.50_DSC_3546.nef (28.8 MB)

I only processed the middle exposure in dt.

ps - I got horrible spots on either sensor or lens, or both. Need to get that cleaned asap.

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You can do HDR merges directly in darktable. But there is a problem, when the images do not fit exactly. See my example.


20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3542-hdr.dng.xmp (13.8 KB)

Your sky looks much better! Is it possible to make the foreground brighter while keeping this sky?

Sure :slight_smile: .


20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3542-hdr.dng.xmp (15.9 KB)

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I had another go at it.


20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3542_01.nef.xmp (13.1 KB)

Working on the same single image. I tried using exposure with a mask 1st, but that didn’t work. Then I tried tone equaliser a bit. Mostly I fiddled around in filmic itself.

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Thanks for posting, funny challenge
HDRmerge + DT 3.2.1

20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3542-3546_01.dng.xmp (14.0 KB)

@zhopudey: Am I assuming correctly that you are doing some “more extensive” editing on the main/first taken/middle in the series RAW before you use Hugin to stack them? If my assumptions is correct; I would advise you to do as little editing as possible before stacking your shots, be it with Hugin, HDRMerge or from within darktable. Doing this might give you unexpected/unwanted results.

The only editing I do before stacking are related to:

  • Lens corrections. Hugin tries to do this as well, so you might want to experiment to figure out if your RAW editor needs to do this. This for all images in the bracket range.
  • Making sure/checking that the WB is the same for all images in the bracket range. Set this manually if need be.
  • Slight exposure corrections. Depending on the position in the range I make sure that that one isn’t clipped/crunched. This step I do try to avoid (see my D750 tip below).

That’s about it. The actual editing I do on the tif/dng that the stacker spits out…

Some people do edit more extensively before they feed the images to the stacker, but this needs to be done on all of them and keeping it evenly balanced so that the stacker can do the best job is rather hard to do.

One other thing that I do that makes 100% sure that my highlights will not be clipped in the inner/left most shot in the bracket range: I measure for the highlights and then bracket one sided. Not all camera’s can do this out-of-the-box, but you, like me, have a Nikon D750 which can do this.

For those that can only do standard bracketing: Compensate for the amount of stops you want/need to bracket so it becomes the left most in the series and all subsequent shots take longer.

Anyway, just my 2c, as always…

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My take, HDRMerge + darktable 3.3

20201122_07.16.48_DSC_3542-3546.dng.xmp (24.5 KB)

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