Hi Bart,
I am really enjoying this. It suggests a whole new world of possiblities.
Would you provide a few technical details about how you made the enfuse combo. For example, what custom functions did you use on the camera to get the multiple exposures in registration? Does mirror lockup work with autoexposure bracket? Did you use the image alignment feature in enfuse? How did you set the blend parameters in enfuse?
Hi Nat,
I used a 1Ds Mark II at the time I shot this image. That camera allows to shoot up to 7 bracketed shots (user selectable). I chose to use an exposure interval of 1 1/3rd stops between the exposures, with a fixed aperture (always use a fixed aperture for exposure or focus stacking). I had it set for mirror lockup between the exposures (some 4 seconds interval to dampen vibration).
A camera like my 1Ds Mark III allows to do a mirror lockup, and the leave the mirror up so the subsequent exposures only operate the shutter, which reduces the chance of single pixel mis-alignment due to camera shake even further, and less time is required for a bracketing set.
The exposures were made on a tripod, but even then it can happen that the registration beween the bracketed shots shifts 1 pixel. When the images are perfectly in register (one can check e.g. by stacking them in layers in Photo shop and nudge them into best alignment, then save again as separate files), then the files can be fed to the fusion engine of choice. Alternatively one can align them and create an HDR, e.g. with Photomatix, and then either produce a tonemapped LDR version for output, or use the HDR file as a master for multiple renderings which only differ by the range of tonality one wishes to use for "Fusion" or exposure blending (each rendering uses a differnt exposure level from the HDR, some clipped at the shadows others clipped at the highlights, or clipped at both ends).
I like to use the
TuFuse Pro application (Windows only) for exposure fusion, because it offers so much control over the final result (with previews). There are many parameters available that are not available (or implemented differently) in the Enfuse/tufuse command line applications. So I cannot give you direct parameters that would translate to these other programs. TF Pro is a WYSIWYG application (although not color managed), so you can get a pretty good impression about the tonality as long as you use something like AdobeRGB or sRGB on most Gamma 2.2 displays. The colors are more difficult to judge, but TF Pro doesn't calculate based on color, but on brightness, so you'll get a color mix from the input images (which can help if you e.g. use a different White balance, e.g. Warmer, less Blue, for your shadow image to be fused).
Exposure fusion offers many creative options, but its main strength is a natural looking exposure blending of different brightnesses from a high dynamic range scene. The only drawback is that the input images need to be aligned before fusion. One may need to do that with another application first before feeding the aligned results to TF Pro.
Bart
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