Interior Light Study - Equirectangular projection

Hi folks - I revisited an old series of HDR panoramic images to try out some new things. This was shot on a Nodal Ninja 5L head, Canon 5DII, 15mm full frame fisheye. Six around, Zenith, Nadir (2) and offset nadir fill shot.

Pano segment raws were batch merged to EXRs in Photomatix and a small JPEG of each EXR was tonemapped in Photomatix to make the stitching faster (all automatic - took no effort, thus the magic of Photomatix).

The small JPEGs were used to make the stitch in PTGui and, once the stitch was good, the full-res EXRs were substituted into the project to make the final HDR pano.

The resulting HDR pano was saved as EXR and brought into After Effects for toning with the GingerHDR plug-in - the 32bit file was exported as PS layers from After Effects and brought into PSCS6 where some additional 32it tweaks were done, mode changed to 16 bit and finished.

Whew! Considering my previous attempts at this scene, this one turned out much better. Which just reminds me that one can always get better - trying all the time!

kirk

Here are the small JPEGs from Photomatix, resized to 800 on long edge, if you are interested. If you want to try stitching this yourself, the focal length is 15mm, full frame fisheye, sensor crop factor of 1 (5DII full frame). This should give the stitcher the correct lens info. However, the "exposure" across the entire pano is not constant because the tonemapping preset will produce different results for different scene luminance levels. So, you may need to enable some sort of exposure adjustment or just live with the bad blend and hone your stitching skills.

kirk

Nadir02

Um... forgive me, but is this not doing things The Really Hard Way?

Why not just use PTGui to make the EXR or exposure-fused TIFF, and then go to tonemapping/processing from there?

(OTOH, I'm lazy. I prefer even more automation, and I'm not an HDR shooter).

Because, it is faster to use small JPEGs to refine the stitch and then substitute the full res EXRs for final stitch and blend. Following the PTGui tutorial is fine if you feed it a sequence of smallish JPEGs and let PTGui do the full merge and stitch. With 5DII raw files (each ~25MB) the stitching can get a little unwieldy. Sure, you can do it, by why fight with an overly burdensome process when PTGui permits you to do it in a much easier way.

If you download the archive of JPEGs (12 images in total) in the PTGui tutorial to which you linked, and take a look at them, the entire JPEG archive is about the size of one 5DII raw file. The above HDR pano was done with 7 exposures at each of the 10 pano segments for a total of 70 raw files, or about 70files x 25MB/file = 1.75 GB of data.

See what I'm saying? That's where the power of Photomatix's batch merge and PTGui's templating system comes into play. Photomatix automates the production of both the full res EXR and small, toned JPEG; you can still do a full 32bit stitch in PTGui, you just set it all up with the small JPEGs so that your system does not get bogged down. Even with a pano head leveled and images shot with a Promote Control, a full spherical panorama still requires manual stitching, making it crucial to have an interactive PTGui session to get the stitch clean.

I know you shoot high-quality spherical panoramas and you use a 5DII - I'd be curious to hear how you manage the memory overhead in this kind of stitch.

kirk

Actually, I don't do high-quality. I deliver to web via Flickr (I'm just a hobbyist after all), and my equirectangulars never get beyond 6000x3000, so I'm usually fine stitching with JPEGs, rather than RAWs. And these days, I'm mostly relearning everything all over again with a micro four-thirds camera and the Samyang 7.5 fisheye.

And in the setup you're shooting in this particular image, I might go with off-camera flash, rather than HDR. Like I said. Lazy.

inkista wrote in post #15733304
Actually, I don't do high-quality.

I've seen your work, don't try to fool me.

The point of this image was natural light. PS, I'm a hobbyist, too, but I am way into the physics of light and use 32bit workflow wherever practical.

kirk