Backpeddling a little on Oloneo

Oloneo has great potential and can become a top HDR competitor, but they still need much work on their alignment/ghosting/mov​ing objects feature.

I compared Oloneo to Photomatix using a multi-exposure shot with very slight tree branch movement. Photomatix did ok with the movement, but Oloneo made the branches look "skeleton-like" - like branches with the leaves stripped off. Very funky looking and unusable. Adjusting Oloneo to replicate the standard set by photomatix caused the rest of the image to be trashed.

Yup - alignment and ghosting is acknowledged as poor in the current beta. But it is a beta and giving them feedback on problem images can only help. SNS-HDR also has problems with ghosting.

Did you try Photoshop CS5's HDR de-ghosting?

bunyarra wrote in post #10925871
Yup - alignment and ghosting is acknowledged as poor in the current beta. But it is a beta and giving them feedback on problem images can only help. SNS-HDR also has problems with ghosting.

Did you try Photoshop CS5's HDR de-ghosting?

Nope, I haven't upgraded yet. From what I've seen the images look good but I cannot say that I've seen anything posted that specifically puts CS5's alignment feature to the test.

CH - I have shot a 7 exposure sequence handheld with a 5D and 70-200 lens and merged with no problems in CS5. I *think* the images I shot are on a drive here at work, but they may be at home. I will try to dig them up and post the results in this thread. My impressions, if I recall correctly, were that CS5 did an excellent job at aligning and deghosting. I believe I shot at 70mm, but, again, I will check and post here. The deghosting was primarily directed at moving leaves and tree branches, as your mentioned in your example.

As with most things, there are trade-offs and strengths and weaknesses and weighing those against workflow.

Kirk

I've made the same observation when it comes to Oloneo's ability to align multiple images. CS5 does the best job for that from my experience. If you take a look at my "Thunderhead" post, I was able to select which frame to use for the position of the jet flying in front of the clouds...therefore eleminating any ghosting.

I know it is (very) early, but I wonder if anyone has heard of an upcoming CS6 and possible release date? I am wanting to upgrade to CS5, but if it is to be replaced before next fall, I will wait. I like what I am reading about CS5 on various topics, including HDR.

I found my handheld files. 8 exposures of a scene that probably did not warrant that large of an exposure range - but I was shooting something else and took the sequence. This was handheld, with a 5D and a 70-200 2.8L USM IS. The images were shot at 70mm, ISO 400, f/5.6 with shutter speeds ranging from 1/4000 sec to 1/30 sec.

Here is an animated GIF to give you an idea of the shift between individual frames - there was rotation and translation of the camera:

Here are larger crops of areas with trees against a static background, with the images aligned - that is, the static elements are aligned and the movement is due to wind in the trees (ghosting candidates). The irregular borders within the crops are due to the shifted images within the sequence - their borders are not all aligned and therefore you may see the edges of individual images within the sequence if the 100% crops in the GIF include the individual image borders.

Here is the final image, merged and aligned in CS5 and mapped in Float32 plug-in. I did a gentle hi radius USM and a final sharpen for 1024px output. Just tried to keep things natural - I also went conservative on the white point to preserve the stucco-like detail in the surface of the house. Not an aesthetically wonderful image, but an image I snapped handheld with a lot of exposures in the sequence. keep ion mind that the trees around the edge of the image that appear blurry are, indeed, blurry due to DoF - that is, they are much closer to me than the house is, so the f/5.6 aperture blurred them. These features are often difficult to deghost because they have very ambiguous borders. I think CS5 did a nice job.

All of this being said - I just ran the RAWs through Photomatix 4 beta9 and their selective, manual deghosting is pretty cool and worked well. The alignment algorithm (feature matching choice) also did a nice job in this sequence. However, the HDR data PM produced was a mess in terms of color and luminance. Still, good to see the PM beta progressing.

Kirk

Wow, no kidding! I don't have the full size file - thus the ability to zoom around and pixel peep - but based on what I see here, it looks like CS5 did a perfect job!

Must be just me, but I've had good success with Oloneo's handling of moving branches, tall grass, ect. Aligning handheld shots works equally well for both, though if I am shooting on a tripod I have found that it's necessary to uncheck the align images in Oloneo or it will sometimes have problems aligning them. I've never had any issues with Oloneo aligning handheld shots.

I"m currently using CS4 with PS plugin. With PS & PM I often get wierd color flaring in addition to ghosting almost as if the program is trying to fix it, but can't and inevitably leaves a color turd in the shot. Oloneo just processes each layer and if they don't line up so be it. Often times these don't require any cleanup because it blends into the scene anyway.

I've been processing every HDR I shoot now in both platforms. I love the speed of Oloneo but on my recent shots I'm find PS & PM is consistently giving me better results, or to say it another way, giving me results closer to the look I"m going for.

You know, Kirk, this method really provides good illustration for someone just starting on HDR to show just how far you need to bracket. When you gather the data for a proper range, you really should crank up a new thread with the animation and give dialog explaining it. It really shows how far you need to go and I think would help newcomers see the range. It could turn into a sticky for this section.

great thread

Now that I graduated to the late 1990's with my animated GIF technology, I think I will write a tutorial walking through the steps of shooting, merging, dynamic range mapping and finishing an image - precisely like you mentioned. Thanks for this thread.

Kirk