I’ve been contemplating getting into real estate photography to support my photography habit. There is a lot of HDR/exposure blending/fusion in most photographer’s work flow. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research and found there is an Enfuse plug in for Lightroom. Basically, you gather all of your bracketed shots in to individual “stacks” then tell the plug in to run Enfuse on each “stack.” It batch processes all of the stacks and put the resulting .tif back in to the original folder so you only have to re-import the folder for final editing.
Do we have any way of doing batch HDR/exposure blending… processing like that? In one video I saw the photographer had about 20 stacks that Enfuse worked on while he ate dinner. He had the final product to the client the day after the shoot thanks to the Enfuse plug in. I’m rarely jealous of Lightroom but this is pretty fantastic.
Under Linux, the Hugin packages install both align_image_stack and enfuse as command-line programs.
You can easily make a small bash script that runs the two commands in sequence on your bracketed images and generates a final infused TIFF.
Tomorrow I will post an example, if you like.
I always get a chuckle out of LR enfuse plugin folks not realizing they’re using Free Software most of the time.
In fact, I see you even commented on it back then too!
There’s a few different parameters you’ll probably want to tweak for best results, so I’d run it against smaller stacks at first in areas of interest so you don’t waste too much time. I used it for some macro stacking in this post as well. It might give some hints on usage for better results, depending on the source material.
Sounds like a good idea to me! I’ll get it up tomorrow (if you don’t beat me to it).
I’d be happy with a script or a tutorial on Hugin! I have no experience with the Hugin batch processor so I am looking forward to it. My command line skills are pretty limited so I probably couldn’t “easily” make a bash script but I’m willing to learn!
And, yes, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your writing, it’s been a great help. Thanks for running all of this.
I hate to be “that guy” but I was wondering how the tutorial was coming along? Also, does it require the panorama creator? I am having some issues getting the panorama creator to open (see my other Hugin post).
I’ve got it installed but it only runs on jpgs I think? I can’t get it to run on tifs so I’m not sure how much I’d actually use it. I don’t think it will batch process a number of different “stacks” either. I do love the idea of running enfuse or align_image_stack in darktable though.
