HDR and panorama issues

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas with
the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop and
several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just to
align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB images,
so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge and I'm
running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images making
up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd end up
with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a panorama.
I don't like doing it this way because I have far less control over HDR
settings per image.

Thanks for any help.

Bill

In article ,
Bill Stormer wrote:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas with
the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop and
several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just to
align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB images,
so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge and I'm
running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images making
up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd end up
with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a panorama.
I don't like doing it this way because I have far less control over HDR
settings per image.


Can't you create a pano for each exposure separately and merge them into
a HDR after that?
--
teleportation kills

On Wed, 28 Sep 2016 13:47:40 -0400, Bill Stormer
wrote:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas with
the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop and
several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just to
align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB images,
so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge and I'm
running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images making
up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd end up
with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a panorama.
I don't like doing it this way because I have far less control over HDR
settings per image.

I don't think there is any other workable way to do this. Just use the
same settings in the HDR program for each set of 3. Find settings that
work well on any sets with extreme exposure issues, and use those for
every set.

On 2016-09-28 17:47:40 +0000, Bill Stormer said:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas
with the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop
and several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just
to align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB
images, so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge
and I'm running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images
making up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd
end up with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a
panorama. I don't like doing it this way because I have far less
control over HDR settings per image.

Thanks for any help.

Bill

I am going to start by making the assumption that you used a tripod.

Are these JPEG or RAW files, and what is the actual 3-shot HDR bracket
(+2:0:-2)?

What camera were you using, and what software other than Photoshop
(tell us which edition) are you using?

Did your camera have the capability of shooting an exposure bracket, or
did you have to reset for each shot?

For what you have already shot, I would run the HDR processing on a
single 3 shot set, and apply the same settings as a preset to the
others rather than trying to deal with them individually. Then I would
attempt to build the panorama.

If the problem lies with the alignment in the individual HDR bracket
sets, it might be best to abandon stitching the finished HDRs and use
the "0" EV set to build a pano, and if you still want to go the HDR
route use whatever HDR software you are using to tonemap from a single
pano image. Since you are using Windows, the now free NIK collection
(NIK HDR EfexPro) might do this job for you.

Your final option is to build three panos from each of the exposure
bracket shots, and then process the three exposure panos as an HDR.

....and finally consider why an HDR is even needed.
--
Regards,

Savageduck

On 09/28/2016 02:08 PM, android wrote:
In article ,
Bill Stormer wrote:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas with
the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop and
several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just to
align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB images,
so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge and I'm
running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images making
up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd end up
with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a panorama.
I don't like doing it this way because I have far less control over HDR
settings per image.


Can't you create a pano for each exposure separately and merge them into
a HDR after that?


That's exactly what I've been trying to do, but not only is each pano
very large (45 images each x 12 GB per image), but none of the software
seems to want to align much beyond the center of each pano, no matter
what settings I try. I even tried masking out certain sections in
Photoshop with each pano as a layer, but there still ends up being a
misalignment much as if the program is trying to warp the images to
match but it makes the alignment worse.

On 09/28/2016 02:32 PM, Bill W wrote:
On Wed, 28 Sep 2016 13:47:40 -0400, Bill Stormer
wrote:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas with
the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop and
several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just to
align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB images,
so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge and I'm
running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images making
up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd end up
with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a panorama.
I don't like doing it this way because I have far less control over HDR
settings per image.

I don't think there is any other workable way to do this. Just use the
same settings in the HDR program for each set of 3. Find settings that
work well on any sets with extreme exposure issues, and use those for
every set.

I tend to overprocess in HDR, which is why I wanted to process the
entire pano HDR at once. I may have to do as you suggest, but I'm leary
of applying any settings to individual HDR's. If there was some
suggested settings, that would be mild at best, and fully take advantage
of the full range of the histogram, I would feel a lot better about it.

On 09/28/2016 02:35 PM, Savageduck wrote:
On 2016-09-28 17:47:40 +0000, Bill Stormer said:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost
my camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the
shutter button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR.
Unfortunately, this seemed to offset alignment slightly between
successive frames. While I can easily create a panorama from one set
of equally exposed images, I am unable to combine the under and over
exposed panoramas with the normally exposed without misalignment.
I've tried Photoshop and several HDR programs. I even attempted to
use Microsoft ICE just to align and then save the layers, but there is
still misalignment. Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I
can and have processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live
with that if I have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB
images, so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge
and I'm running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images
making up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd
end up with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a
panorama. I don't like doing it this way because I have far less
control over HDR settings per image.

Thanks for any help.

Bill

I am going to start by making the assumption that you used a tripod.

Yes, I did, correct.


Are these JPEG or RAW files, and what is the actual 3-shot HDR bracket
(+2:0:-2)?

RAW (DNG) from a Pentax Kx, 12 Mb size. My in camera metering wasn't
working on the day of the pano for some reason, so I did my best to
estimate at least +1, 0, -1 but it does vary since I had to guesstimate.


What camera were you using, and what software other than Photoshop (tell
us which edition) are you using?

I have the very latest addition of Photoshop and Lightroom. Other
software tried has been SNS HDRpro and Photomatrix Pro. I even tried
using the latest Microsoft ICE just to align and then save as a PSD as
layers, but I still end up with the same "warped" misalignment.


Did your camera have the capability of shooting an exposure bracket, or
did you have to reset for each shot?

Without the remote, I had to reset each exposure manually and this was
sure tedious.


For what you have already shot, I would run the HDR processing on a
single 3 shot set, and apply the same settings as a preset to the others
rather than trying to deal with them individually. Then I would attempt
to build the panorama.

I'm afraid I might have to do this, but I have far less control than
over an HDR panorama.


If the problem lies with the alignment in the individual HDR bracket
sets, it might be best to abandon stitching the finished HDRs and use
the "0" EV set to build a pano, and if you still want to go the HDR
route use whatever HDR software you are using to tonemap from a single
pano image. Since you are using Windows, the now free NIK collection
(NIK HDR EfexPro) might do this job for you.

Your final option is to build three panos from each of the exposure
bracket shots, and then process the three exposure panos as an HDR.

...and finally consider why an HDR is even needed.

On 2016-09-28 19:38:16 +0000, Bill Stormer said:

On 09/28/2016 02:08 PM, android wrote:
In article ,
Bill Stormer wrote:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas with
the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop and
several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just to
align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB images,
so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge and I'm
running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images making
up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd end up
with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a panorama.
I don't like doing it this way because I have far less control over HDR
settings per image.


Can't you create a pano for each exposure separately and merge them into
a HDR after that?


That's exactly what I've been trying to do, but not only is each pano
very large (45 images each x 12 GB per image), but none of the software
seems to want to align much beyond the center of each pano, no matter
what settings I try. I even tried masking out certain sections in
Photoshop with each pano as a layer, but there still ends up being a
misalignment much as if the program is trying to warp the images to
match but it makes the alignment worse.

Were you building a linear pano, and was this handheld?
What sort of overlap were you using?
What lens were you using and were you using landscape or portrait
orientation for the camera?
45 exposures for a pano seems ambitious.

It seems to me that you have bigger problems with the pano than the
HDR. Usually Photoshop or Lightroom can handle a merge to Panorama and
fix outer edges very well.

Here is one of my Yosemite panos done with Lightroom.
https://db.tt/NPMVNcGG
--
Regards,

Savageduck

In article ,
Bill Stormer wrote:

On 09/28/2016 02:08 PM, android wrote:
In article ,
Bill Stormer wrote:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost my
camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the shutter
button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR. Unfortunately,
this seemed to offset alignment slightly between successive frames.
While I can easily create a panorama from one set of equally exposed
images, I am unable to combine the under and over exposed panoramas with
the normally exposed without misalignment. I've tried Photoshop and
several HDR programs. I even attempted to use Microsoft ICE just to
align and then save the layers, but there is still misalignment.
Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I can and have
processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live with that if I
have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB images,
so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge and I'm
running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images making
up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd end up
with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a panorama.
I don't like doing it this way because I have far less control over HDR
settings per image.


Can't you create a pano for each exposure separately and merge them into
a HDR after that?


That's exactly what I've been trying to do, but not only is each pano
very large (45 images each x 12 GB per image), but none of the software
seems to want to align much beyond the center of each pano, no matter
what settings I try. I even tried masking out certain sections in
Photoshop with each pano as a layer, but there still ends up being a
misalignment much as if the program is trying to warp the images to
match but it makes the alignment worse.

This one is free but YMMV:

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

Tut for HDR:

http://wiki.panotools.org/HDR_workflow_with_hugin
--
teleportation kills

On 2016-09-28 19:48:52 +0000, Bill Stormer said:

On 09/28/2016 02:35 PM, Savageduck wrote:
On 2016-09-28 17:47:40 +0000, Bill Stormer said:

I was to a well known photogenic place recently and decided beforehand
that I would try to do an HDR panorama of the area. However, I lost
my camera remote beforehand and was forced to manually press the
shutter button each time I needed a different exposure for HDR.
Unfortunately, this seemed to offset alignment slightly between
successive frames. While I can easily create a panorama from one set
of equally exposed images, I am unable to combine the under and over
exposed panoramas with the normally exposed without misalignment.
I've tried Photoshop and several HDR programs. I even attempted to
use Microsoft ICE just to align and then save the layers, but there is
still misalignment. Unfortunately, I can't go back and shoot these. I
can and have processed just the normal exposure panorama and can live
with that if I have to, but I had hoped to get the HDR benefits as well.

Any ideas would be welcome. Each panorama is a set of 45, 12 MB
images, so the resulting panorama from each exposure setting is huge
and I'm running into memory issues.

One idea would be to go back and combine each sub-set of 3 images
making up the 45 total (for a grand total of 135 images), but then I'd
end up with 45 HDR images that would have to then be combined into a
panorama. I don't like doing it this way because I have far less
control over HDR settings per image.

Thanks for any help.

Bill

I am going to start by making the assumption that you used a tripod.

Yes, I did, correct.

OK! I hope it was level.

Are these JPEG or RAW files, and what is the actual 3-shot HDR bracket
(+2:0:-2)?

RAW (DNG) from a Pentax Kx, 12 Mb size. My in camera metering wasn't
working on the day of the pano for some reason, so I did my best to
estimate at least +1, 0, -1 but it does vary since I had to guesstimate.

It seems odd that the camera metering wasn't working. That alone is
going to make things tough.

What camera were you using, and what software other than Photoshop (tell
us which edition) are you using?

I have the very latest addition of Photoshop and Lightroom. Other
software tried has been SNS HDRpro and Photomatrix Pro. I even tried
using the latest Microsoft ICE just to align and then save as a PSD as
layers, but I still end up with the same "warped" misalignment.

If you are using PS CS6 + LR6, or PS CC + LR CC, the merge to panorama
and the merge to HDR are both very effective, especially with RAW(DNG)
files, and with LR there is a very powerful method of working HDR with
single RAW files.


Did your camera have the capability of shooting an exposure bracket, or
did you have to reset for each shot?

Without the remote, I had to reset each exposure manually and this was
sure tedious.

I just checked your camera's manual and on page 109 (of the online PDF)
it outlines using three exposure bracketing. No remote needed.


For what you have already shot, I would run the HDR processing on a
single 3 shot set, and apply the same settings as a preset to the others
rather than trying to deal with them individually. Then I would attempt
to build the panorama.

I'm afraid I might have to do this, but I have far less control than
over an HDR panorama.


If the problem lies with the alignment in the individual HDR bracket
sets, it might be best to abandon stitching the finished HDRs and use
the "0" EV set to build a pano, and if you still want to go the HDR
route use whatever HDR software you are using to tonemap from a single
pano image. Since you are using Windows, the now free NIK collection
(NIK HDR EfexPro) might do this job for you.

Your final option is to build three panos from each of the exposure
bracket shots, and then process the three exposure panos as an HDR.

...and finally consider why an HDR is even needed.


--
Regards,

Savageduck