Sunrise over Söderåsen National Park

Söderåsen is a ridge (or a horst) in Scania in southern Sweden. This is a view from Kopparhatten, which at a height of 200m above sea level is the highest point in Söderåsens national park. Taken in September 2015.

5 shots per view bracketed 2EV apart, three views. Developed and processed after stitching in RawTherapee, managed in digiKam, brackets merged in HDRMerge, healed in GIMP. Taken with my 10 year old and very beaten up Pentax K10D and a 50-200mm kit lens.

8 Likes

A tad grainy but the colors, light, depth and mood are gorgeous :heart_eyes: A really nice photo! :slight_smile:

  • Slight lean to the left (or is that the relief which is that way?)
  • Strange artefact ((0,148) to (304,148)) very visible on my display if I tilt it a bit)
  • Electricity pole (I think) that could be edited out at (640,746)

Otherwise, gorgeous picture!

Thank you!

Grain - I like luminance grain, I only remove chroma noise.
Slight tilt - could be the landscape, could be my sloppiness, the truth probably lies somewhere between :slightly_smiling:
Artifact - I can’t see it, I even pumped up the levels in GIMP to find it. But if you see something its most likely an artifact from merging exposures, which is double trouble when you’re using such battered gear with cheap lenses.
Poles - I think they are masts from houses. There are at least two. I was actually asked “where is the phone antenna?” by someone familiar with this view, but the antenna in question was off to the left of the panorama, not visible in this field ov view, so I decided to leave any other man-made things as they are. I actually like seeing that there are traces of people living there somewhere in-between the trees.

Did you bracket first and then make the pano? Or make one pano per exposure and then bracket those into an HDR?

I use “merge” as an umbrella term for any approach which combines two or more bracketed shots, including processes such as fusion, creating images in Radiance RGBE or OpenEXR formats, or as in this case creating raw HDR DNGs.
I merge before stitching whenever I can, for a number of good reasons, one of which is that you have 5 times less images to deal with which makes the whole process easier.

What a lovely view!

The stitch looks nice and clean and the colors are wonderful: all creamy and peachy and warm+cold. :slight_smile:

There does appear to be a slight left lean? I might personally consider a bit more definition/contrast in the shadowed trees? Not much, but a little bit to enhance the neat fog falloff.

These are some pretty minor nitpicks that I had to really work to find (and I had to borrow the left lean from @Ofnuts:smiley: ).

Thanks Pat! Deciding on the right brightness roll-off was made a little difficult because of the issue that people will view the image on various un-calibrated monitors

Relevant:

I will explain what causes the artifact issue, to the best of my knowledge, so that others can avoid it.
HDRMerge does a great job at merging bracketed shots, but it does expect them to be constant except for the exposure time. This is generally what you expect to happen when bracketing, but the Pentax K10D in manual mode does something silly because it brackets using the aperture too, so if you’re using a lens with electronically controlled aperture with no option of locking it, as is the case with the kit 50-200mm lens, then the camera will bracket n-stops by adjusting n/2 using exposure time and the other n/2 using the aperture, and there’s nothing you can do about it (other than shooting in exposure-priority mode which brings even more trouble). Why does this lead to possible artifacts? Because changing aperture influences a number of things, specifically vignetting and distortion, ever so slightly but significantly enough to possibly cause trouble. HDRMerge then tries to combine f/5.6, f/8 and f/11 shots (for example), and that can lead to artifact issues.

Have you tried doing the merging/blending and stitching in Huggin?

Not for this panorama, but I have been using Hugin and the components Hugin uses, mostly Enfuse, for many years.