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.
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
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?
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…