How to manipulate Fattal or do I need to change my workflow?

Software Luminance HDR
1

At this moment it literally takes me hours to generate a HDR from RAW/NEF. Not because the output is only bad but because I am going for perfect instead of ok.

The biggest problem is generating the TIFF’s from RAW/NEF that will be fed into Luminance HDR. I have no clue where to focus on thus apply basic settings like color profile, sharpening, noise reduction and then just start trying.

So let’s say I fed the TIFF’s into Luminance HDR and I see in the Fattal operator that I want more contrast. What do I need to edit in RawTherapee for that? The answer is not to give the 3 input files more contrast.

And in general: What’s the way to go? Apply same settings to all 3 input files? Or focus on generating a certain histogram? Or something else?

2

As HDR Tonemapping in RT is Fattal, you could combine your raws using HdrMerge, feed the output into RT and process it there. That could make the processing easier.

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3

Although I use darktable the process should be similar.

Process all input images the same. Do as little pre-processing on them as you can - denoise, lens correction, linear tone curve. Don’t do any sharpening or contrast tweaks. Export to 16 bit TIFF and import into LuminanceHDR, then tonemap and save as 16-bit TIFF. Bring the tonemapped image back into RT to do any further post-processing.

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4

I failed to produce super nice results like I used to in Luminance HDR.

I get only flat results when not doing pre-processing.
Ah and when editing in RT afterwards it seem ‘too late’ to restore.

5

I’m not understanding something which you may explain: LuminanceHDR reads raws directly, why are you pre-converting them to TIFF?

6

So far, I am getting much better results with some pre-processing. The pre-processing isn’t much, but it’s very hard to find the best working settings though. That’s why I hate the method but love the result.