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[OM] Re: Moose Monday - Shameless Plug

Subject: [OM] Re: Moose Monday - Shameless Plug
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:45:03 -0500
Whilst reading the Moose's musings I decided to follow the link to the 
CHDK site for hacking Canyon point & shoot digitals.  Just out of 
curiosity since I don't own such an animal.  I'm glad I did because near 
the bottom of the page are links to freeware for stacking images for 
focus and exposure addition as well as high dynamic range processing.  I 
haven't tried the stacking stuff but I did try the HDR (or DRI) stuff 
and came away impressed.

Before we sold out Boston area house I had taken a lot of photos of the 
interior to make up a sales brochure and web page.  The day I took the 
shots the sun was brilliantly streaming in some of the windows and 
creating an extreme brightness range.  I took a bunch of shots of each 
and later on manually combined them in PhotoShop 7 using layers and 
masking... extremely tedious with so-so results.  Later on, after I got 
PS CS3 I tried the HDR tool with the same set of images and produced 
something a bit better with less effort but I haven't exactly been 
inspired to go make more HDR images with PS CS3.

Now I've tried the Traumflieger-DRI-Tool (freeware from Germany)
<http://www.traumflieger.de/desktop/DRI/dri_tool.php#downlaod>
and I'm impressed.  And you don't really need to understand German 
either even though there is no English version of anything.  You 
download the app directly to whatever folder you'd like to have it in. 
It is a standalone executable with no Windows installation procedure. 
After downloading it just click on the executable and it's instantly up 
and running with a single interface button labeled "START".  The start 
button brings up a file dialog window where you go select the two or 
more HDR images you'd like to combine.  They can be JPEG or TIFF.  With 
no fuss or fanfare you see the images load and instantly get combined 
until the window just holds the output image.  At that point another 
file dialog opens wanting to know where to save the image which is only 
saved as a TIFF file.  You can also cancel the save and push the START 
button again for another go with a different image combination.  It's 
pretty fast so these experiments are fairly painless.

My original exposure set was 7 shots spaced 1 stop apart.  I did a 
couple of experiments using all of the files then every other file and 
finally just two files that were 3 or 4 stops apart which gave me the 
best looking result.  But the highlights were still a bit too bright and 
the shadows a bit too dark.  But a quick run of the output TIFF file 
through Adobe Camera Raw and some adjustment of the highlight recovery 
and shadow sliders brought everything into good range.  No doubt this 
can be done even better with some more experimentation (I had to push 
the recovery slider to its full travel) but I was greatly impressed that 
I had bettered all of my previous effort with just a couple minutes 
work.  Recommended.

Incidentally, the output file is a 16-bit TIFF so I assume I could have 
fed it 16-bit TIFF's as input instead of JPEG's and gotten a better 
tonal distribution in the output.  I also just realized that I had been 
feeding it 4 MP JPEG's instead of 13 MP JPEGS even though all were from 
the 5D.  I guess I cut them down somewhere along the way since they were 
only to be used to make web images and small prints for a brochure.  So 
maybe it's not as fast as first appeared but it was pretty quick on 
those smaller images.

Chuck Norcutt




AG Schnozz wrote:
> I figured everybody here is automatically tuning into "Moose Monday",
> but I wanted to give a special promotion to it this week. Moose is
> firing on all cylinders this week. If he keeps this up, we'll have to
> keep him around.  :)
> 
> www.zone-10.com
> 
> BTW, the gallery software is currently being rehashed a little bit.
> Please bear with our dust. We're also in the midst of getting on a
> new server, so some stuff may appear or disappear.
> 
> AG

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