Paul Debevec doesn't need much of an introduction - he is one of the founding fathers of HDRI. His latest research is so way out there, yet he has the incredible talent to explain everything so it makes perfect sense.

Watch this and prepare to be amazed:

If you want to see more detailed information about Paul's projects, visit www.debevec.org. Check out his upcoming events calender, he will be touring Germany next month.

Oh, and by the way - the Lightstage shown in this video is in fact out of the lab already. If you just want to rent one for your own production, you can do so. Without any R&D and handcrafting on your end, just a simple plug-and-play product from Aguru Images.

It's that time of the month again: Update time. Lots of updates, most of them from other folks:

Photomatix 3.0 is out

Available for Mac and PC.
Lots of new features:

• support for the latest RAW formats
• feature-based alignment
• more accurate tonemapping preview
• improved exposure blending

The most visible change is a "Workflow Shortcuts" palette with the most common tasks. Very handy, but in my opinion they shouldn't reinvent the wheel when a simple toolbar would have been just fine (and wasted less real estate on my screen).

Anyway, my friend Uwe Steinmüller has put together a full review on www,outbackphoto.com. Check it out, and grab your update!

XDepth Plugin for Lightwave

This is really great news. Not only because I happen to be a Lightwave user, and I can now save Gigs of drive space by using this space-saving HDR format for my big HDR panoramas. (We talked about XDepth before.)
No, the great thing about this is the demonstrated sign of commitment. Trellis Management Co. Ltd., as awkward this name sounds to me, has given away XDepth plugins for Photoshop and Lightwave within a single month. Now, if they would get it to work next month in Fusion, I'd be happy rendering all day long things I might not even need in HDR, and our systems guy wouldn't kick me in the back. Add Firefox, Lightroom, Aperture, After Effects, Maya, 3dMAX, XSI, Shake, Combustion, and [insert your app here], and we actually can call XDepth an image standard.

Last but not least - here is some news from the related frontier of digital imaging:

Greg Downing shoots 270 Gigapixel Panoramas

If you ever tried to shoot and stitch a single Gigapixel pano, you know that this is a painful and time consuming process. Shooting 270 of these bastards, in 3 1/2 months - unthinkable for mere mortals. Even for a veteran HDR/panoshooter like Greg Downing this is a project of crazy scale.
Read this amazing story on VRMag!

And yes, before you ask, of course there is a new sIBL of the month, and the race for the hottest HDR on Flickr has started all over again.

Have fun,
Christian Bloch

OK, so now that I have thousands of German readers, I finally gave in and translated most of the HDRLabs site to German. At least most of the static pages, don't expect this blog to be truly bilingual anytime soon... The language switch is done server-sided, so if your browser/system language is set to German, you should be switched automatically.

And I have a special treat for my English readers (which make up 40%, by the way):
You get a sneak peak tutorial chapter! How awesome is that?

The German translation of my book is out now!

So all you crazy Germanic fellows, what are you waiting for - order "Das HDRI Handbuch" from Amazon.de now!

Yes, it is somewhat ironic that the book started out as my diploma thesis in German. But I promise - even if you are one of the thousands of people who downloaded and read my thesis for free, you will not be disappointed by the book! It's three times the pages, in much finer print, with tons of more images and written in a casual, less academic style. Some information in my thesis was plain wrong anyway - just glad my profs didn't notice :). Heck, back then tonemapping wasn't even a topic at all, and now it is a major content area with tutorials from two professional photographers.

Guess it's time to do a proper translation of this website as well...

New website section: Say hello to the Hardware Shopping List.

If you're looking for the panorama equipment, or new cameras with HDRI in mind, you will find just the right thing on this new Hardware Shopping List. Featured are all personal recommendations, nobody paid me to put their product in this list. Instead, each product links to the most helpful review I could find, and of course it features the popular vote system known from the Software Link List.

Also, there is a brand new sIBL of the month waiting for you, and the Hot-on-Flickr gallery just restarted today.
By the way - it still amazes me to see this gallery fill up so quickly. See, it filters only images uploaded since March 1st., yet it is filled with 99 images at 1 AM! Makes me wonder what the HDR upload per minute on flickr must be.... Usually there is a lot of fluctuation in this gallery within the first 10 days of a month, and then the very popular (and some very good ones) float atop and stick there.

Enjoy this update,
Peace!

A new HDR file format seemingly popped out of nowhere, just when we were discussing HDPhoto here. XDepth is aiming at the same thing: efficient compression of HDR images, so they can be distributed over the web. Or take up less storage space - we all know how HDR files eat through your drive, especially when you're dealing with image sequences.

Admittedly, I was a little skeptical about this format. The publisher is very secretive about their encoding approach, sounds like the format is proprietary. And the publisher's name, "Trellis Management Co. Ltd.", doesn't really give me a warm fuzzy feeling either. They actually had another HDR format out for almost a year, called "CLARITY-HDR^TM but aside from the initial announcement I haven't seen it anywhere.

That being said, here is the scoop: XDepth is amazing! It combines the best things of JPEG-HDR and HDPhoto: It's backwards-compatible with JPEG and instantly usable with a free Photoshop Plugin. And after an initial test, it even seems to beat both of them in the amount of compression. Well done, Trellis!

But first things first - here is what the Photoshop saver looks like:

XDepth's Photoshop Saver Dialog: Well organized and usable by mere mortals.

Notice the separation of HDR and LDR compression. When you save your image as XDepth file, the saver will actually make a regular 8-bit JPG, and hide the HDR data in the matadata. That's right - even though the native file extension is .xdp, you can just rename it to .jpg and it will open anywhere. In fact, the XDepth website itself is made of nothing but these renamed .xdp files, making it the first truly HDR online presence on the web.
In the context of this dialog, LDR quality sets the compression of this base-JPG, and the Gamma value is your crude tonemapping control, letting you choose how contrasty you want in this JPEG. The default value 2.2 corresponds to the default settings in Photoshop's 32-bit Preview.

The interesting part comes in when you re-open the file in Photoshop. Then all the hidden HDR data comes back, and find yourself in 32-bit mode.

So let's see how the format compares, using the good old Kitchen Window again.
To include my current favorite, Ward's JPEG-HDR, I pulled it up in Photosphere (for the lack of a Photoshop Plugin, which is in real life a deal breaker by itself).

It turns out, XDepth beats JPEG-HDR and HDPhoto in filesize, although it doesn't look quite as clean. "Lossless" in the saver dialog apparently means "perceptually lossless", not absolutely lossless. In that regard, XDepth will certainly not make OpenEXR obsolete for images that we still need to work with.

However, that isn't what XDepth is aiming at - it is more of a final output format, like JPEG. It is supposed to crunch stuff as small as it gets, while still looking acceptable.

And this is where XDepth's strength is at: Just a tiny wiggle on the quality slider, to 90/95%, will shrink that EXR from 5.7 MB to 344 kB. That's only 1/17th of the size!! And it still looks fine.
Just for the sake of it, I tried to get the HDPhoto to the same file size, and ended up at 48% quality. At this point, the image turns into cubist masterpiece of artifacts.

Bottom line is: XDepth offers an impressive compression ratio, and usability is very straight-forward. The format has all it takes to become the standard for high dynamic range JPEG, clearing the path for a smooth transition to the promised land of All Things HDRI.
However, the catch is Licensing and application support. For now, Trellis Management Co. Ltd. seems to be friendly enough to provide us the tools for free. My wild guess is, they won't make it all open like OpenEXR, instead they will tackle one application at a time and implement import/export plugins themselves. And then, in stage 2, when everyone calls for direct hardware support, they will ask camera and screen makers for licensing fees. I might be entirely wrong here, but if I'm not: Good luck, Trellis, I really hope you succeed! Your format is simply too nice to get lost in some legal grind.

So go grab the Photoshop Plugin from the XDepth website and start playing with it!