1. I opened the raws in HDRMerge with all options unchecked and exported them using 32/none. I forgot to export the masks; if necessary, I will do that later. Exposure bracketing is as follows:
name
ev
1600
-1.5
1599
-1
1598
-0.5
1594
0
1595
0.5
1596
1
1597
1.5
Heeding @Morgan_Hardwood’s suggestion, I saved the following HDR files:
name
raws
hdr2.dng
1600;1599
hdr3.dng
1600;1599;1598
hdr4.dng
1600;1599;1598;1595
hdr5.dng
1600;1599;1598;1595;1596
I omitted 1594 because it is 2 pixels off vertically, and developed 1597 by itself (I forgot to make an HDR file with 1600;1599;1598;1595;1596;1597).
2. Then I developed the 1597 and HDR files using PhotoFlow and cropped them using G’MIC for posting. The TIFs’ negative values are clipped but the +ve values are unbounded.
Besides the unexpected noise levels of the HDR files, they should be aligned with 1597. Edit: oh, I see, the dimensions are different: 4000x3000 v 4036x3026.
Update Here are the hdr masks with the hdr6_.tif crop: hdr_masks_hdr6_.zip (8.3 MB).
Maybe I am doing it wrong, which is why I started this thread… I usually go from PhotoFlow to gmic. Since @gadolf is using dt, from dt with everything turned off:
@afre I don’t know what to say except that the only two settings I changed were checking align images at the beginning, and 10 for mask blur radius when saving the hdr, but I can’t see how this could relate to noise.
I just came from repeating it and I got the exact same results as my post above show.
Conclusion: there’s no silver bullet. In this set of images, 3 pixels seems to be more suitable (maybe because there is more detail, maybe because there are no moving objects like clouds…). In these jpgs this is not very clear, but when editing the dngs in Darktable it’s also noticeable that the bigger radius messes with the boundary between darks and highlights
Good point!
I confess that I didn’t quite understood the original issue (since it seemed to work, to me), but anyway, glad to see hdrmerge is better, thanks! I am and will continue be a heavy hdrmerge user.
