Amazingly natural looking new exposure blending method

[Cem_Usakligil]

These tools are great....

... says the guy who's lost a good night's sleep to endless experiments with En/Tufuse, Enblend and Hugin (LOL). See, the tools are so powerful and intriguing, I just forgot the time. I kept on redoing many of my HDR images (previously done in Photomatix) and could not discover even one which was worse than Photomatix. But to be honest, for a few images it was necessary to do some post tweaking ("fill in light", contrast and saturation adjustments). But realizm wise, less-noise wise, Enfuse just rocks. And to make things even better, it's all for free. Well, I paid a symbolic amount to Tim for his LR plug-in to show some camaraderie, but I am equally at home using the command-line interface of the free versions.

Just great, thanks Bart again for bringing them into our attentions.

Kr,

Cem

 

[JimCollum]

i just got it as well, and get the same error about half the time i start it. any ideas on this? (running winxp, sp2, 4gb mem)

Hi Tim

great idea, straight out of the converter!

I gave the demo a try, but run in some problems:

"Internal error.

dev/LREnfuse.lua:1153:
Access to undefined global LOC."

The bug went away, when restarting LR/optimising the catalog.

On Mac/PPC; 10.4.11, plenty of RAM...
Some other enfuse options I use work fine.

 

[JimCollum]

so far (with some minor glitches), this is an excellent plug-in. no halo's!!!

i'm wondering if there's a way to store data and attach it to a stack in LR. that way, the paramters that you use can be saved along with the sequence of images

 

[Cem_Usakligil]

i just got it as well, and get the same error about half the time i start it. any ideas on this? (running winxp, sp2, 4gb mem)

Ditto here. The first conversion in LR works OK. The second conversion fails with the error message. Then I close LR, open it again and do another first conversion which works OK.

Totally reproducible, totally predictable, totally annoying ;-).

Kr,

Cem

 

[Michael Fontana]

so far (with some minor glitches), this is an excellent plug-in. no halo's!!!

i'm wondering if there's a way to store data and attach it to a stack in LR. that way, the paramters that you use can be saved along with the sequence of images

LR can write and read .xml-files, but not .txt's.
First, I don't know if enfuse itself - embedded in Tim's plugin - is able to write xml's.
That would be necessary for following your intention.
2nd enfuse requires the ability to read these xmls. as well.

Shure, there's a way to implement it, my guess is that it requires a new version of enfuse. Not impossible, as enfuse is open source.

Jim, Cem:

please mention your OS, mac/win, etc plus the LRversion.
This helps Tim to track down the bug.

It's possible too, that the bug is itself in LR, better LR's programming lunguage, wich is Lua Over 40% of Adobe Lightroom is written in it.

And yes, I've sometimes that lua 1153-error again.

 

[Cem_Usakligil]

...
Jim, Cem:

please mention your OS, mac/win, etc plus the LRversion.
This helps Tim to track down the bug.
.

Hi Michael,

It would help indeed, were it not for the fact that Jim has already mentioned this info when he wrote

<snip>... any ideas on this? (running winxp, sp2, 4gb mem)

and I dittoed it, ergo my config is the same.

LR version which was not mentioned is 1.3.1. though .

Cheers,

Cem

 

[Michael Fontana]

Cem,
to bad, my fault, sorry!
I didn't read your ditto standing for the OS, too, meanwhile bypassing Jim's notation of the OS.

 

[Cem_Usakligil]

Cem,
to bad, my fault, sorry!
I didn't read your ditto standing for the OS, too, meanwhile bypassing Jim's notation of the OS.

No worries, happens to all of us

 

[Andrew Rodney]

i just got it as well, and get the same error about half the time i start it. any ideas on this? (running winxp, sp2, 4gb mem)

Ran fine on the Mac. This is really quite awesome, I'm very, very impressed. Off to make a donation.

 

[Andrew Rodney]

Ditto here. The first conversion in LR works OK. The second conversion fails with the error message. Then I close LR, open it again and do another first conversion which works OK.

Totally reproducible, totally predictable, totally annoying ;-).

Kr,

Cem

I spoke too soon. It's happening on the Mac too. But somewhat intermittent.

I'm selecting two hand-held images in one test and there's a tiny difference due to movement of course. Using Photoshop's Align Layers does an awesome job of making the two line up, resulting in a lot less noise after running a Medium (on the smart objects) and I'd suspect a similar functionality could be used here? Of course you'd need to properly line up the images like Photoshop which I suspect isn't an easy task. But if so....

 

[Tim Armes]

Hi Tim

great idea, straight out of the converter!

I gave the demo a try, but run in some problems:

"Internal error.

dev/LREnfuse.lua:1153:
Access to undefined global LOC."

The bug went away, when restarting LR/optimising the catalog.

On Mac/PPC; 10.4.11, plenty of RAM...
Some other enfuse options I use work fine.

Turns out that this a nasty LR bug. The latest version on my site (downloads as 1.05, but web page isn't updated yet) should, hopefully, fix it.

I haven't seen it myself, so I can't be 100% sure. Please let me know.

Tim

 

[Michael Fontana]

Tim

testing it on a handfull of examples; to me it seems to be fine, right now.
Kinda everything's smoother now.

There's a really nice feature in your plugin, that other enfuse-GUI's don't have: the preview!

 

[JimCollum]

a quick test in the Redwoods (about an 18stop DR from shadows to blue sky)

(ok.. there's a touch of blown highlight in the branch.. but that wasn't captured in any of the exposures)

 

[Andrew Rodney]

Got a couple questions I'd like to ask about using the product in perhaps a way not originally intended.

I see that if I make a Virtual copy of an image in LR and apply some metadata edit, just select the one image and apply, the edits are applied as they should be (good). I was wondering if the blending of various VC's might be useful or interesting. But perhaps if there are not bracketed images, nothing results? For example, with one Raw, could I apply a series of differing adjustments (tone only or other?) and select them come up with anything useful?

 

[Michael Fontana]

Andrew

are you thinking to something specific?

Sure, you can °bracket° a single RAW in 3 tonal different tiffs and merge them; and it will look better, but IMHO you will not gain more image data from the source.

Talking about other adjustements in the converter, like WB, etc, my guess and experience sofar is, that the mix of these is qualitywise better done in PS, with layermasks, than with a automated merging.

 

[John_Nevill]

Tim,

Seems to work ok with LRwin, in fact made a donation to try it out in more detail.

Default settings give quite a natural output, although had an error on full version with EXIF tool.

 

[Andrew Rodney]

Andrew
are you thinking to something specific?

In addition to auto blending one Raw with several renderings, I'm also thinking about perhaps a way to reduce noise, much as you can in Photoshop using the blend multiple Smart Objects/Medium trick, something I've been playing around with that's somewhat laborious to do. Then there's the idea of taking say a color image and a B&W split tone and blending them. Just trying to think of ways of selecting multiple images (of the same subject in alignment of course) in LR and producing a blended effect, something we don't currently have in an export like plug-in.

 

[Nick Rains]

In addition to auto blending one Raw with several renderings, I'm also thinking about perhaps a way to reduce noise, much as you can in Photoshop using the blend multiple Smart Objects/Medium trick, something I've been playing around with that's somewhat laborious to do. Then there's the idea of taking say a color image and a B&W split tone and blending them. Just trying to think of ways of selecting multiple images (of the same subject in alignment of course) in LR and producing a blended effect, something we don't currently have in an export like plug-in.

Hi Andrew

No doubt you will have thought of this, but a quick way to gather images together for tricksy bending is to use Bridge/Tools/Photoshop/Photomerge on a set of images, use the 'reposition only' option and uncheck Blend Images. You just end up with a nice stack of images neatly aligned ready for blending.

I used this method to blend two exposures together using a simple layer mask. Quick and easy but not 'batchable'.

Tim's LR plugin is a great step forward.

Nick

 

[Andrew Rodney]

No doubt you will have thought of this, but a quick way to gather images together for tricksy bending is to use Bridge/Tools/Photoshop/Photomerge on a set of images, use the 'reposition only' option and uncheck Blend Images. You just end up with a nice stack of images neatly aligned ready for blending.

I'm trying to avoid Bridge (like the plague) and further, Photoshop.

 

[Nick Rains]

I'm trying to avoid Bridge (like the plague) and further, Photoshop.

I find it really interesting how people's perceptions vary. Personally I find Bridge useful but far from ideal. I find LR also useful but even less ideal with it's rigid modus operandi.

Not sure how to avoid Photoshop though

Nick

 

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I used this method to blend two exposures together using a simple layer mask.

A simple layer mask can sometimes be not so simple ...

Bart

 

[Tim Armes]

Hi,

I've now released version 1.10:

The output filename can down be defined as a name to append to the first image. This helps doing batch operations.

Virtual copies can now be blended. You can create several variants of the same image and blend them together.

The blended file can now be opened in any application

A reset button has been added to the basic fusion options

Fixed the annoying "Undefined global: LOC" bug.

Regards,

Tim

 

[Michael Fontana]

A simple layer mask can sometimes be not so simple ...
Bart

That can be true, too, but might be sometimes the best solution.

Every automated merging/enfusing, etc bases on some algorythms, and works therefore for some situations very well. Other situations might call for other edits.

I found with enfuse/Tim's plugin - without further edits - quite a extrem amount of keepers, relativ to other tools.

But there might be some rather rare light conditions, where these algorythms will not fit.

A example: a single photo with different light sources, therefore different light temperatures, tint, etc, and different contrast: tungstene to the left, daylight at the center, FLs at the right.

Todays RC's can't handle this, as they let us set a global contrast, plus a bit of local contrast, but we might need individual contrasts for each light source, to have a nice tonality.

So today, we create some different tiffs out of the identical RAW. Every automated process will kinda average these tiffs, and even out the specific light characterstic.

Today, the photographer only °knows° that the tungstene light is in the left part of the image only, daylight in the center, and FL at the right. The machine can't know it.

I have been running into this problem with stitches with about 180 degrées. As it has a much wider FOV, the chance of running into °incompatible° image areas/RAW conversions is much bigger than with a singleshot and a standart lens with a small FOV.
When trying to resolve it automated, it didn't worked.

 

[Cem_Usakligil]

Hi,

I've now released version 1.10:

The output filename can down be defined as a name to append to the first image. This helps doing batch operations.

Virtual copies can now be blended. You can create several variants of the same image and blend them together.

The blended file can now be opened in any application

A reset button has been added to the basic fusion options

Fixed the annoying "Undefined global: LOC" bug.

Regards,

Tim

Thanks Tim,

Any plans on coming with an enhanced version whereby the handheld photos are first aligned prior to Enfusing? That would be great .

Cheers,

Cem

 

[Michael Fontana]

Bravo Tim

some really usefull enhancements!

I like the new naming convention very much, too...

 

[Michael Fontana]

Tim

your LRenfuse-plugin ins't recognised by the LR vers 1.4 anymore.
I updated this morning, and its gone in the LR- edit- menu.

So better stay with the vers 1.3, at the moment....

 

[Tim Armes]

Alternatively, you could download the latest version from my web site.

 

[Cem_Usakligil]

Alternatively, you could download the latest version from my web site.

Which I did this morning (LOL)...

 

[Michael Fontana]

Tim

faster than Adobe ;-)

Vers 1.2 works flawless, thanks!

 

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Alternatively, you could download the latest version from my web site.

Tim, you're fast. This does however raise a question about backwards compatibility. Does each update of LR invalidate plug-ins made for prior versions? Or was there something specific with LR 1.4 that caused this break?

Bart