I gave this pano a quick go, and merged the brackets before even checking what they were, before checking whether it was worth merging them. Since there was little difference between the brackets in each bracketed set there was very little to gain, and the resulting merged file, after automatic alignment, suffered from some issues.
There were merging artifacts in the clouds:
Furthermore, each source raw file was riddled with dead pixels, so the merged file had as many dead pixels if not more - the extra ones would appear in transition zones where the source images blended one into another.
The lesson is that there is little to gain, and in fact time and quality to lose, by merging shots where the difference between the darkest and brightest image is only 1EV, as is the case here. As such, I would recommend uploading only the darkest shot of each bracketed stack: CRW_3488.DNG, CRW_3491.DNG and CRW_3494.DNG.
It was fun to see what could be squeezed out from raw files from such a tiny compact camera.
I did this in two steps.
- The first step was to squash the dynamic range. I suppose I did this more out of habit than necessity. The first reason for squashing before stitching was that some programs don’t handle high precision (floating-point TIFF or EXR) images well, so you can avoid the issues by stitching 16-bit TIFFs which were already compressed (tone-mapped, fused, manually blended, whatever). The second reason is that some tools requires much RAM, and when dealing with high resolution panoramas (hundreds of megapixels) you might not be able to run certain tools on the whole stitched pano. Neither of these reasons apply here, since this is a small panorama. Here is one of the compressed images before stitching:
- The three tiles were then stitched in Hugin, and the final pano got a curves treatment in RawTherapee with a little wavelet edge sharpness and TM for pop:
Resulting overcooked pano:
