Playing around with HDR panos

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  • #1892
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Circled around behind a thunderstorm last week trying to get some clouds (was hoping for a rainbow, but it was too early in the day). Took a few days off from the pace at work and was rewarded with a hike on the rim of Palo Duro Canyon just after the storm passed through. We listened to a pack of coyotes make dinner of a calf down in the right-hand side of the image.

    8 bracketed shots (24 total) from a 5DII with the kit lens at 24mm and f22. Put together in linux with ufraw/luminance/hugin’s panorama. Crushed my system, I had to combine into LDR before stitching. Time to buy more RAM, 4gig ain’t gonna cut it.

    I think I may take a week off and head up to the western slope in Colorado next month and camp&shoot.

    ***oops. I broke my link. New one farther down the thread***

    #30567
    ravnostic
    Participant

    Wow; that is REALLY outstanding! I gotta get me some HDR software (after the polar mount, of course. Priorities).

    #30568
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Thanks! Means a lot to get compliments in this place! 😉

    I hear ya on priorities. Do what I do and use the free stuff. Everything I use is free and/or open-source. All 3 of the programs I used for that image have windows ports, if that’s what you’re using. I’ve been really impressed with Hugin’s Panorama Creator once I learned how to use it properly. The AI needs a little work, but plotting the inevitable manual control points to stitch the images seamlessly really is easy and takes less time than the actual processing. The “original” of the above is ~15Kx5K and Hugin’s worked fine until I ran out of RAM, and then ran out of swap space. That’s with a 10G swap partition BTW… 24 120meg 48bit TIFFS seem to eat up resources for some reason…

    #30569
    ravnostic
    Participant

    I keep all my pics and stuff on a separate drive, so I should have 30+ free swap space. I’ll check on the pano creator; what are you using for the HDR?

    #30570
    linguine
    Participant

    Thats beautiful.

    #30571
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Thank you, linguine.

    ravnostic, Hugin Panorama incorporates Enfuse/Enblend so it does some basic HDR for you right out of the box. There aren’t many adjustments for the HDR side of the house though, so I’ve been using Luminance (formerly Qtpfsgui) to create individual HDRs tonemapped into LDRs to stitch together. Luminance has many adjustments and I’m very fond of a couple of their included algorithms for both photographic and surreal images. The latest release of Luminance is worth getting even if you have Qtpfsgui… full multi-core support now plus some major glitch fixes with large images and overall color handling. It still can’t handle CR2 files properly, but conversion to 48bit tiff files is something we’ve all had to do for a while now anyway. They’ve also fixed the “missing EXIF data” crash.

    If you’ve got the resources you may be able to work completely in 48bit color, but when you run out of ram and start using swap space things slow down *painfully*. I’m beginning to think that 16gig of ram may be a minimum requirement for HDR pano work, unless you don’t mind mashing “go” and going to bed while the processing takes place.

    #30572
    Elsinore
    Keymaster

    Wow nice. I also use open source stuff–GIMP, Qtpfsgui (haven’t upgraded to Luminance yet), UFRAW, etc. I’m excited to try out Luminance now!

    #30573
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Hook yourself up with a copy of Cinepaint, Elsinore… unless you’re using windows, they’ve discontinued support for reasons I don’t know. So far it’s been the only open-source package I’ve found that can edit and adjust 16bit/channel (even does 32bit float/channel!) images. Also handles HDR and OpenEXR formats. Sadly, it’s lacking a decent filterset (which I sorely need for astrophotography and other fun photo stuff) but otherwise it’s great for levels and curves on RAW files that would just get mangled in GIMP when one gets aggressive with stretching.

    #30574
    chupathingie
    Participant

    I dropped off a cleaned-up, re-stitched .tif of this at the printer’s this weekend. Had them print up one at 36″ and a handful at 20″ (the big one’s for the wife, the smaller ones are requests from friends). It’s hard to describe being able to see all the detail at once. I was really surprised that even at 36″ it still looks sharp. Looks like after a year we’re finally gonna have something to hang in the living room LOL

    #30575
    orionid
    Participant

    WOW.

    I’ve been wanting to try something like this for a while, but was afraid of the ensuing system meltdown.
    /Still kinda skeered.

    #30576
    chupathingie
    Participant

    DO IT. It won’t cost you much, really; and you’ll learn a lot.

    I learned I need more RAM, and a bigger swap partition. My first run was attempted as a full-on 48-bit color composite of twenty-four 120meg TIFFs. I watched 4gig of RAM disappear, then 10gig of swap fill up before I killed the process and decided I needed to compose to HDR and send the LDR output off to the stitcher. I plan on increasing both RAM and the swap partition just for this kind of thing. And all the linux geeks told me I was wasting HD space with a 10G swap. “2G should be enough for ANYBODY!” LOL

    So far what I’ve found about printing is that I’ve been rather conservative, or maybe just lucky to have stuck to not printing to a size that goes beyond the 300dpi mark. My final image is ~14K pixels wide, so I think I could conceivably go as large as 46″, but reduction is an asset when you have any noise in the base image; and my clouds have a sheen of static that thankfully didn’t show up at 36″.

    Cost BTW, will of course vary, but a cheapskate like myself can get a passable 36″ print for under $50…. I’m still looking at printers, tho and will pay more if they have a better print process than Kinko’s.

    #30577
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Oh.. BTW… please note that inkjet almost sucks for anything that one might even loosely consider art. CMYK is far superior, but it will cost you a fortune unless you’re printing in bulk. Anyone here with printing experience is more than welcome to chime in… I’m very much of the mind to spend a few long weekends driving in a 500 mile radius to catch scenery+weather, and I really would like to be able get good quality prints at a fair price; even if it costs more than the inkjet folks.

    (Trish (my wife) worked for a decade in the print industry, and I got to see a lot of cool examples beyond soup labels, not to mention she’s even more picky than I about color)

    #30578
    CauseISaidSo
    Participant

    Cost BTW, will of course vary, but a cheapskate like myself can get a passable 36″ print for under $50…. I’m still looking at printers, tho and will pay more if they have a better print process than Kinko’s.

    I don’t know about Kinko’s equipment, so I can’t say if they have a better print process, but I’ve used these people once and was really happy with the results: http://www.elcocolor.com/poster_special.htm

    They’ve got an internet special where they won’t do any kind of post-processing (which I wouldn’t want them to do anyway), just print exactly what you send and you have to order a minimum of two posters, but their prices are pretty hard to beat I’ve found. For example:

    20×30 = $9.95 luster/glossy, $12.95 Fuji metallic
    30×60 = $30 luster/glossy, $38.95 Fuji metallic

    If you try them, I strongly suggest going with the Fuji metallic for that image. I printed a couple of photos on it and I really like it.

    Oh, and finally, really cool photo!

    #30579
    chupathingie
    Participant

    w00t! I took 1st place at the Tri-State Fair!

    /end-zone showboat, runs to fridge for beer 😀

    Here’s the cleaned-up/reworked image I entered:

    #30580
    Curious
    Participant

    congrats on the win. that is a really beautiful photo(s).

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