What’s Your Preference?

tybo78 · #1 (**permalink**) 05-25-2010, 04:06 AM

Has Anyone ever tried an HDR Panoramic?
After processing each image for HDR do you think the pixels would be too distorted to mach up in the overlap? Also the tone, saturation, balance and all that would have to match exactly in each image as well. If all those settings were locked in the initial capture, shot in RAW, and the parameters are identical in the PP, do you think it would work out? I don't.
OR! You could stitch the particular EV shots together and do the HDR PP after that!?
What do you think? I think the second idea has a better chance and makes more sense now that I think of it.

tybo78 · #2 (**permalink**) 05-25-2010, 04:16 AM

I did a google search on this and got a lot of good hits so i guess my Q got A'd.
Sometimes I think "I'll ask DPS!" before I think "I'll ask google."

OsmosisStudios · #3 (**permalink**) 05-25-2010, 05:07 AM

There was a post about this a while back, actually.

I'd recommend doing 3 Panos: 1 for each EV value. Then combine them in your HDR processor.

Swisstony10 · #4 (**permalink**) 05-25-2010, 09:52 AM

I've tried it both ways:

Making an HDR of each image and then stitching them together sucked really badly, because the tone of each one came out very slightly different, and I had unpleasant bright and dark bands where each part of the panorama overlapped. That could've been down to my technique though.

I've had much more success by stitching together each of the exposure sets to give me three bracketed panorama images, which I then cropped to make them all exactly the same size (Photomatix gets its knickers in a twist if the images are all different sizes and shapes), and process them to make a single one.

The one thing that I did find was that because of the increased time that it took to get all the images (even using high-speed continuous shooting for each section of the panorama) I got some really shocking ghosting - the best results I had were of a view of Ilfracombe, and if you get in close you can see some of the cars driving along the main road appear two or three times. I guess I should go in and clone them out, but I'm just not that much of a perfectionist.