There is always someone

Have you noticed that just as you set up a shot and press the button someone is likely to wander across your photo and cast an awkward shadow of even block out part of your subject? For conventional HDRi\ this can be a disaster, or a lot of cropping. These where taken with my android phone using HDR Camera, which has a “feature” that it uses the first photo as a reference and other items in a single frame only will be removed, rather than included as a ghost. Not sure how its done but it does take some stress away.
I took this photo series of a decorated CFA van to test a theory I have that HDRi is a good technique for the harsh Australian summer midday sun. With a single exposure they best I would have expected was a bleached out sky and the silhouette of the white van (blown out with no detail) against the background trees dark in shadow.
PS: If you want to get the “official” CFA/DSE Bush Fire warnings and alerts on your smartphone for this sumer visit this link.

Picturenaut 3.0 to the Rescue

I was taking photos of some of my artwork, bas-relief style sculptures, for the upcoming Venus Artists Contemporary Showcase. I have found it is quiet a challenge to get the colours “accurate” and at the same time getting the whole surface in focus & distortion free (maybe more on that later). The “best” exposures are all too often “flat”, albeit with slightly bleached colours but nicely exposure to that average 50% grey tone. So I got the thinking maybe HDRi could do it better. I liked what it achieved, do you?
I had recently updated Picturenaut, now in version 3.0. It is nice piece of software for doing HDRI fairly automatically (not lots of fiddling with sliders and adjustments). Best it works perfectly as a Portable App off a USB key, so I have it in my camera bag at all times.
The new version does a better job at guessing the EV setting than previous versions and now behaves when I used 5 photos in my bracketed set. It now has a neat feature ghost removal (some things inevitably move and a distracting ghost outline can be left is parts of the image). The  automatic image alignment (which does a good job realigning and adjusting handheld photos) is improved. Both these take time but free you from a lot of unnecessary fiddling. The real time save is in the tone mapping, which may fewer options and controls than other systems, but the four methods provided should cover most needs. You will be able to avoid those lurid colours and unnatural if some what surreal lighting that many other HDRi packages conjure up for unsuspecting new users.

More on HDR (High Dynamic Range)

I posted last week, about the HDR or more precisely HDRi  (High Dynamic Range Imaging) technique, to attempt to get a higher dynamic range into a single exposure. I was inspired enough try out what can be achieved with a few popular freeware and shareware/trial version of software, and it is time to share my finding so far.
Well the first big shock was in the amount of ghosting I saw. This resulted because the images could not be superimposed adHDRequately and was mainly due to the fact that I had taken most of the bracketed exposure sets handheld (without a tripod to ensure that the images where exactly the same view). In fact some of the ghosting was so bad in many cases the final photo looks out of focus.
Most packages offer some way to adjust individual exposures but most where to say the least tedious (ie more up and down one pixel with each press of the mouse or arrow key, in just horizontal and vertical directions independently). Only Dynamic Photo seems to allow rotation as well, and it has a nice "pin warping" method that snap difficult areas undependably. On this count alone this means that only dynamic photo and Fdrtools are the only software from this trial I will keep installed on my computer.
Artizen and Photomatrix are probably the first HDR software you'll discover with a google search. The final tone mapped images are nice but I was too frustrated with the ghosting to give them a second chance. I've deleted both! They are both trial version and have a prominent watermark on the output.

FDRtools was refreshingly easy to use and I will run through an example later using it. It gave a lot of opportunity to tweak things without undue complexity. Its default tone mapping is not quiet as rich as the other packages

Dynamic photo ended up my favourite, just not 100% sure why, I think is was a combination of being able to align handheld images and the nice tone mapping choices. it has a small watermark on the free version

For comparison purpose this was the "best of" the original bracketed set. Note all the detail in the foreground is lost.