Only a small testimony

We all know how good is Hugin to stitch photo to create pano or to apply the Brenizer method.
The first is which Hugin was born .

But I found a case use that its a little out of Hugin schemas: HDR of 3 or more images that aren’t really good aligned (I know, I should use my tripod).
Luminance HDR and HDRmerge didn’t give good results at all, with a lot of halo, even with manual interventation.

With Hugin this is the result:

Almost no artifacts and a good dynamic range, for my taste.

6 Likes

Nice! I’ll keep Hugin in mind for aligning HDR shots.

I don’t think I did know about the Brenizer/“fake medium format” method. Something else for me to try. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I find the Brenizer method something really nice to try.

Give it a chance :slight_smile:

Is there a Hugin tutorial for this somewhere?

This is the Hugin configuration and steps I usually follow when combining bracketed shots…
It is better to start from images that have already been corrected for barrel distortion, to improve the matching of control points at the edges of the frames.

First of all, I set the interface in “Expert” mode to have full control over the parameters.

Then I load the images, I choose “Align_image_stack linear” as the algorithm to create control points, set the “geometric” optimisation to “Custom parameters” and the “photometric” one to “Low dynamic range”:

Next I click on the “Create control points” button and then move to the “Optimiser” tab.
Here, I select the Roll, horizontal (TrX) and vertical (TrY) camera translations as the only parameters to optimise (because one generally only translates or rotates the camera when shooting handheld a distant subject). Then I click on “Optimise now!” and let the software do its magic:

Finally, in the “Stitcher” tab I click in sequence on “Calculate field of view”, “Calculate optimal size” and “Fit crop to images”. Then I select the outputs like in the screenshot below, to have the maximum number of post-processing options:

  • the output of enfuse (“Exposure fused from any arrangement”)
  • the HDR output in EXR format
  • the individual images after remapping and without any exposure correction, if I want to do some manual exposure blending via luminosity masks in GIMP or PhotoFlow (“No exposure correction, low dynamic range”)

And finally I hit the “Stitch!” button:

Hope this helps others to start using the excellent hugin/enfuse combination for pseudo-HDR processing!

7 Likes

Once upon a time, pfstmo tools were only available via the terminal. Worse, they were unable to produce an EXR/HDR image on their own (they were only meant to do the tone mapping, hence the name).

So, once upon a time, this was the only way we had of creating hdr images (Hugin allowed us to export the resulting images as exr/hdr). Once we did that we then still had to run pfstmo multiple times across the various TMO’s until we got near a result we liked (then had to tweak the params to dial it in). Ah, the good ol days… walking uphill to work both ways… :wink:

I had part of one written at one time, but I guess it would be nice to have a new one (and a great opportunity to use it to help raise community awareness some more too).

In short, shoot with as shallow a dof as you can muster (going long on focal length helps here). Start grabbing shots all around your subject (try to grab the subject first to minimize shifting between shots). I think the originator of the popularity of the technique (Brenizer) actually said somewhere that he only shoots JPG for these, as the resolution will be ridiculous once stacked, and he doesn’t gain anything by shooting raw.

2 Likes

@Carmelo_DrRaw More or less my workflow.

@paperdigits there are plenty of tutorial for Brenizer.
Simplifing: shallow deep of field, shoot first tour subject, then, going from near to far, shoot around, then stitch everything with hugin

Something like this

This is a simplified gif that explain the process

3 Likes

I, too, have recently discovered this capability within Hugin. It is really convenient for those times you forget your tripod! But also, it works great for general HDR workflow too. It is really useful that it produces exr images that can be further edited in Darktable, etc. Hugin is such a great tool!

Wonderful tutorial! It is more or less how I have been doing it, but I definitely learned a few new tricks in there! :smile:

1 Like

Thanks! Maybe with the help of @patdavid and @Dario_M (and others?) we can transform it into a real tutorial? It would need a more representative example of bracketed image and some better/more exhaustive text…

1 Like

Yes! I had been working on one for a panorama, but have not be able to achieve good results lately. I can capture some bracked shots for this.

This was not clear to me, perhaps it is a different because you’re on OS X. When you click the “Create control points” button, does it launch the “Finding control points” action or does it move you to the “Optimizer” tab?

It launches the “Finding control points” action and then I move manually to the “Optimizer” tab to compute the actual alignment parameters…

Yes! This would be great! I, too, will be happy to help if I can. Certainly I could donate some bracketed shots at the very least. Just let me know what I can do to help!

@Isaac if you post your bracketed shots, I’ll start adapting a tutorial.

Cool, I will do that ASAP. It the first day of class today, and I have to finish preparing my lectures, but I will try to get this done by tomorrow afternoon…

@Carmelo_DrRaw @Isaac I’ve started adapting a tutorial over here: https://github.com/paperdigits/website/tree/hugin-aligning-images-tutorial/src/articles/aligning-images-with-hugin

3 Likes

Awesome! I took a few indoor bracketed example shots yesterday, but want to get some outdoor ones too. What is the best way to get you the images? Fork the git repo, add them and issue a pull request? Just hist them somewhere? Do you want raw images? Jpegs? Tiffs?

I’ll get them where ever you put them. Github pull request with raw images would be best and easiest for me.

1 Like

Great job @paperdigits. I’ll give it an eye later this day

Just an FYI, I’ve forked the website repo, made my local clone and have merged up to your “hugin-aligning-images-tutorial” branch. I will add the bracketed shots over the weekend and then will send you a pull request when it is ready!

1 Like