I succeeded stitching images in Hugin after toggling this and that without having a clue what I’m doing. But then there’s masking, deghosting etc. which I honestly would have hoped a software would do for me, or at least somehow lead my hand. Which is why this topic is about HDRMerge – sadly producing weird results.
Darktable can do unaligned HDR raws on its own.
Thank you for the video, I’ll watch it as soon as I’m back on PC.
Panasonics have a weird per-channel black level. Maybe HDRMerge doesn’t handle this correctly?
It can’t. Not really.
Taking your 3 images as an example: There are three people in the foreground that cannot be aligned (hence the ghosting). How would software know which one to use and which 2 to discard? It might even be so that the one that is seen as the most correct from an exposure pov isn’t the one that needs to stay.
Stacking and/or panoramas have some “nice” problems you might run into. Most of those are related to moving objects.
Using the mask tab isn’t all that hard: Create 2 exclude region masks and 1 include region mask. Make sure that your mask outline is just outside of the object.
Here’s what a quick masking can do with the person in the foreground in your 3 shots (300% enlargement with the exposure cranked up to make it more clear):
As you can see I did not bother to mask the (dog?) line that this person is holding and those show up multiple times.
@CarVac : Yeah, I wasn’t all that clear in my reply to @gaaned92 about this. What I meant was that first loading these RAWs in a RAW editor will set the correct black-level. Something that HDRMerge might not be able to do (yet).
Ok, understood. 
Thank you. I’ll dive into it a bit deeper.
HDRMerge 0.5 is really old. If you can find a build of the master branch, use that instead.
You may also want to check out this tutorial:
This provides a tiny bit better results (not out of the box though) but I can’t get rid of the green tint.
@Newerth
for W10 I can propose at HDRMergeNightlyBuilds/ – Keybase.pub from
HDRMerge_master_v0.5.0-146-gcb42a8b_release_64.zip from 24/10/2020
HDRMerge_master_nightly-72-gf5a2538_release_64.zip which includes the last commit from master
HDRMerge_master_gaanedv0.6_release_64.zip which is a wild merge without warranty of unpublished v0.6 branch into master branch
P1210701-1210703.dng (41.2 MB)
If I open the above DNG in Rawtherapee, the black level seems OK; there is no color cast. The raw balck points are 0.
If I open it in ART there is a cast due to wrong black point. I have to set the black point to (425,425,425) and then it is ok.
please, can you have a look?
Remark: the produced DNG seems very dark, so I suspect that HdrMerge don’t choose the right image when generating the DNG . It is OK on display.
Thank you @gaaned92 !! I tried the latest (wild ) version and the cast is gone.
Then I’ve tried to develop the photo and it’s pretty obvious the exposure is entirely wrong and beyond capabilities of the old and small camera sensor. Thus I lost a lot of colors and details in the shadows and replaced them with noise.
So this is what I could squeeze out of it. My phone would do better job. Terrible but I’m not printing it. 
Thanks, should work now
ART
thanks @agriggio
@heckflosse @Morgan_Hardwood
Is there somebody still maintaining Hdrmerge ?
@Newerth I cannot help you with DT, but you can get better processing with it. For instance, you have a strong fringing on the upper right branches. Sure, there is a way in DT to get rid of that.
I think I am still a little heavy on denoising.
It is. It’s just that the lens really struggles here and the default CA module settings were not enough.
I truly failed with this exposure. I should have gone at least f/5.6 and +1 EV.
Using the def ringing function of ART, I can obtain that
You should obtain equivalent or even better result with DT.
The left hand side is the module maxed out, the right hand side is the default as in the image I posted here.
Ah… I returned back to it and figured out that the input color profile was all wrong. So another attempt, now with a lot of fine tuning. Still far from perfect but one can’t beat a dead horse.
P1210701-1210703_01.dng.xmp (12.4 KB)
Had some time to put my above advise into practice.
@olliwa
That’s very nice! 
@Jade_NL
Thank you! Unfortunately, your edit seems to miss the reason why I was doing this and that’s the blown out details in the sky on the left side. Also there’s still some ghosting in the branches to the right. Generally I think that HDRMerge does a pretty good job here by just picking up the correct exposure instead of mixing it all together.
However I think I understand the positives of this approach and soon I’m about to dig into it as I was in fact creating a bracketted pano of this scenery a few minutes later.
I overlooked that with the final edit, Hugin did a good job with the highlights and shadows. One of the first things I did was have a look at the sky due to the very dark end-result that both hugin and hdrmerge produce (hugin does a tad better job of fully keeping the darks and lights within bounds.). After I was done editing in darktable I did not check for clipping. I did accept the way it looked because a very bright patch of sky is very hard to look at with the naked eye and not having been there I had to guess. No excuses, though: Should have checked!
Here’s a tweaked version of the above with no more clipping whatsoever:
Yes! I noticed that as well. Wind in the trees. This is doable in hugin but a long and tedious task, something you only want to do if your shot is really, really worth it.
HDRMerge does do a better job in that regard with these images and thus might be the better choice here. The problem that I have with it, in general, is the lack of control, something that hugin does provide. Then again you asked for a free HDRMerge alternative 
Yes. And definitely thank you for that! I hope it didn’t sound harsh or anything, I’m really grateful.
