timothfarrar
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Upload & Sell: Off
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 p.1 #7 · Sunset and Exposure Bracketing | |
If you aquire, say, 5 bracketed shots each of a 4 shot pano, for a total of 20 images, do you make 5 seperate 4-shot panos, 1 for each shutter speed, and then blend them all into an HDR later, or do you blend each of the 5 versions of each seperate shot into their own seperate HDR, and then stitch them all into a pano at the end? How do you assure that your control points will work out exactly the same for each of the 5 panos that are to be blended into the 1 final HDR pano, epsecially if things like clouds, sun, water, or branches may have moved between shots?
I avoid all these problems. Other than the stitching step, my workflow is exactly the same as it is for doing a non-stitched shot. Of course getting all the 20 shots before things move too much is always a challenge. But this process only takes about 4 times as long as my current non-stitched process, so that's not much of a problem. My exposure blending can deal with the small amounts of movement I see without any major problems.
When shooting, I take the full bracket of exposures for each shot before moving to the next shot.
Here is my workflow for a 4 shot pano with 5 exposures per shot,
1.) Convert the RAW files to DNG files.
2.) Load all the DNG files at once into ACR and set all files to the same White Point and Chromatic Aberration setting, and zero out all other settings (to get an-undeveloped sequence of files).
3.) Run the batch version of FFDD bracket. This blends the 5 un-developed exposures for each of the 4 shots into a high dynamic range blended digital negative.
So now I have 4 shots which have a large amount of dynamic range saved in 4 16-bit tiff files. Note that unlike doing a Photomatix or Adobe HDR with the local contrast adaption option, my blended negatives will not have any artifacts or distortions, they are infact as close as can be to what a single high dynamic range negative would look like if such a camera existed.
4.) Stitch these 4 high dynamic range shots together into a stitched negative.
5.) Create a copy of the large stitched negative, and shrink it down to 1200 pixels wide.
6.) Develop the 1200 pixel wide copy in Photoshop using curves adjustment layers and graduated layer masks to adjust the brightness and contrast. This allows for very fast development. Tring to develop the full size image would be very slow.
7.) Resize the 1200 pixel wide copy to the size of the large stitched file. Then paste in the large stitched negative below all the adjustment layers.
That's it. No HDR worries!
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I also just got 2 extra 4 GB flash cards, so I should be good on storage for a morning or evening shoot with a total room for about 650 exposures. 
