Supermoon HDR with Hugin and Darktable

This was done tonight with a super simple process that could certainly be improved, but which seems to work very well to start. It’s meant to be fast and simple.

Shoot a ±2EV 5 bracketed exposure. Use a sturdy tripod and remote release cable or self timer so that images will be aligned from the start.

Bring JPGS into Hugin. Select all, right click, select “stacks” > “set stack size.” Change number of images in stacks to 5.

Click “find control points.” It will find 0. That’s ok.

Go to Stitcher panel. Calculate optimal size, and crop to image.

Where is says “Combine stacks,” select “exposure fused stacks” with a .tif output container.

Open the resulting .tif in darktable. Mess with tone curve until it looks cool. Pulling highlights down, and bumping shadows. Most fiddly bit is getting the midtones nailed with out introducing too much posterization.

Use equalizer with “denoise and sharpen” preset. Export to JPG.

Done!

Here’s the XMP in case anyone is interested: P1315104 - P1315108_stack_ldr_0000.tif.xmp (4.0 KB)


Edits for spelling, grammar, and clarity.

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Look awesome! Well handled.

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@Isaac Isaac Ullah you wrote “Click “find control points.” It will find 0. That’s ok.”
Can you explain it more detail?

Is it possible to see the original images?

You can follow the instructions here, @yteaot, PIXLS.US - Aligning Images with Hugin

I’ve done a lot of pictures with Hugin but I must always have control points. I do not understand how Hugih operates without control points.

Nice picture!
I am curious about the colored rings visible: Does this effect occur in the atmosphere or lens?

If you’re referring to what I think you’re referring to, then neither. It’s posterization, probably caused by the gamma used in JPG compression.

Really?! I am pretty sure we are referring to the same thing, because that was my first thought too, but I dismissed it (not sure why exactly though). So yeah, boooring - thanks for the education anyway :wink:

Would be interesing to know in which step it was introduced, maybe by doing the hugin workflow in tif and then exporting the end result to jpg with appropriate settings could prevent it?

It was JPG from the start.
The resulting image has very little noise - that can exacerbate posterization as well.

P.S. thought this was funny:
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Sorry, I should have said that I used a tripod, so the images are all perfectly aligned from the beginning. Therefore Hugin will not find control points because it doesn’t need to align the stack. If you did it handheld, you should choose “align image stack” from the choice of which control point routine to use, and it will find some points…

Yes, these are unfortunately some posterization. I did this “quick n dirty,” which means I started with the camera-generated jpgs, not the raw files. When you pull the tone curve to such extremes, unless you have a high bit depth file, you are going to get a posterized image to some extent. The trick is to find a curve setting that minimizes posterization while still giving the tone-stretched look…