A bunch of news have accumulated over the past weeks. Each one deserves a full article, but I'm lacking the time right now. Before they slip out of my mind, here are the quickies:

2009 HDR All-Stars

Shortlist of the hottest new cameras by Jack Howard. Sitting right at the source, Jack gets his HDR-savvy hands on pretty much every new model. Great read. Very tempting to forward this list to Santa Claus.

HDR Darkroom 1.0

Yet another HDR software is out. The feature set is pretty solid for a version 1, albeit I wouldn't call it revolutionary. Very slick workflow-oriented interface, RAW import, 2 image alignment methods, 2 Local and 1 Global Tonemapper. No sign of 360 panorama compensation, and it can't save in EXR format (although it can load it just fine). Haven't run it through all its paces yet, but HDR Darkroom might be something to keep an eye on.

HDR Thumbnail Browser: Bracket

Managing HDR files used to be the biggest workflow gap ever. Lightroom ignores everything HDR, XNView and Adobe Bridge support some formats but have poor display capabilities. To the rescue comes Bracket. Shows about every flavor of HDR imagery, properly gamma-adjusted so you can actually see something, on PC, Mac and Linux. On top of that it's free, hence highly recommended download!

Photomatix Tonemapping PS Plugin v2.0 beta

Has caught up feature-wise with the standalone version, and is even available in 64-bit. I use it now regularly, and it looks very awesome. (Note: Make sure to flatten the image before running this plugin!)

SpheroCam HDR wins Award

Gerhard Bonnet received the Robert-Luther-Award from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh) for changing the game with his SperoCamHDR. Conratulations, Gerhard!

Monthly Site Updates

As you've come to expect, there is a brand new sIBL-of-the-month out, this time from beautiful Barcelona. The Hot-on-Flickr gallery now finds the most interesting December submissions, and looks better than ever. I sweetened the lightbox style and added a slideshow feature.
Most revolutionary are the feature additions in the Community Forum: Attaching images automatically generates zoomable thumbnails, and putting the URL to an equirectangular pano in-between [pano] [/pano] tags will automatically embed the krpano viewer in your message. Pretty slick, huh?

You think Photoshop is weak when it comes to HDR?
Think again.

Jack Howard, fellow RockyNook author and Director of New/Social Media at Adorama, is here to prove you wrong by demonstrating some really cool Photoshop HDR tricks. It's all about getting creative with workarounds.

You may want to watch part 1 first, or just press play below to skip to the really good stuff.



Very inspiring, thanks Jack! Another favorite of mine is tweaking the mask of an exposure adjustment layer with the gradient tool and soft brush strokes. Makes some really smooth "invisible" effects. You know, the kind that only gets the image where I want it without looking processed.
In fact, these are the techniques I rely on when tonemapping these extremely big shots of David Breashears. Just finished another piece:

David Breashears' Karakoram B in 520 Megapixel

Site update:

Long-time members of the HDRI Community forum will recognize the new look, now better matching the site theme. There are also new features: Facebook integration, a Spell Checker, and many more.

Blochi

The glaciers are melting, that's a sad fact of life.

I'm no big environmentalist, and this won't be one of these "Call to Action" posts. It never occured to me that I could make a difference. I mean, yes, my ride is a scooter with 80 miles/gallon, but that's just because I love my Vespa and I got sick of finding parking in LA ;)

And then there's people like David Breashears. A passionate Mout Everest climber, who made it his lifetime goal to educate people about the climate problem. He's matching famous photographs from a hundred years ago, and it's pretty scary how much the "water towers of the world" have dried out in this time. Check out this video clip:



It's called the Glacial Research Imaging Project (GRIP). You might have seen the New York Times Ad on Synday, on the back cover. More info about GRIP is here and here.

After seeing my 2.5 GPixel Grand Canyon pano, David went back up the mountain to reshoot these pictures in HDR and in really really high resolution. He came to me for some shooting advice. After several phone calls I sort of joined the project, doing the merging, stitching and tonemapping.
An interesting challenge. But well worth the effort, especially when the result turns out like this:


onmouseover="karakoramthumb.src='http://www.hdrlabs.com/news/files/karakoram_overthumb.png'"
onmouseout="karakoramthumb.src='http://www.hdrlabs.com/news/files/karakoram_thumb.png'">

David Breashears' Karakoram in 770 Megapixel

You'll get the full explanation to the glacier after Mr. Breashears is back from the mountain, did his round with the scientists, and gets his own website up. I'm just in it for the post processing.

To my knowledge nobody has done an HDR image this big before.

Here's what I learned during the process:

• Photoshop CS4 is the only app that can load and tonemap an EXR file of 6 GB.
• AutoPano Giga can make such a file, but it needs to be on LInear Blending, no Color Correction, and no Compression.
• That's why Vignetting needs to be removed during RAW development (Lightroom here).
• SmartBlend works on PC, but not on Mac. Although it still tends to generate blending artifacts in HDR mode.
• PTGui on the other hand, works great at this size with standard PTGui blending.
• The 64-bit version of CS4 is pretty responsive in the viewport, but every operation (load/save/sharpen/flatten) takes ages. Consdering the image eats up 10 GB of RAM, only my VFX workstation at work can actually do this.
• Tonemapping snow is hard. Somehow it always turns out grey. Figured out that this is just a mental thing: there is no upper point of reference. So there is nothing stopping me from overdoing the local contrasts, effectively working against the overall global contrast and darkening the snow patches.
• TIFF files can't be bigger than 4 GB.
• PSB is the only file format that really works. Can bloat up to > 17 GB, when tonemapping manually with adjustment layers.
• Photomatix 64-bit, made for tonemapping huge images, needs to support PSB. At least the single layer, flattened PSB - otherwise it's kind of pointless.
• Gigapanos are strange. Tonemapping them to look good in every zoom level, all the way out and when focussing on a tiny detail - very hard.

Why did I go full HDR on this?

Using a local tonemapper on the tiles before stitching was my first idea. But that leads to a huge variation in overall brightness. Especially the clear sky tiles turn into a mess, because noise/grain is the only detail emphasized here.

On the other hand, all the snow and ice do show a very high dynamic range. A combined field of view of 320 degree makes it even worse. Compare the result with the Best Exposure Preview stitch, and you'll see that the HDR treatment does make a hell lot of sense. Although, in comparison, that preview stitch was ridicuously easy done in Autopano Giga on MacbookPro.

While my involvement probably won't stop the glaciers, it's nice to gather some Karma points while tackling an interesting HDR challenge like this.

Despite the title, this video only has a remote connection to HDR.
It's still worth watching, especially for all you Canon-heads out there...

How to increase the Canon 7D dynamic range (Tutorial) from Luka on Vimeo.

Some remarks:

If you want to give this a shot, hop over to Luka's Vimeo page for the download links.

Although this is all just a hack, it's a very effective one (as Luka's examples show). I'm actually surprised such an aggressive grading doesn't cause more visible banding and posterization artifacts. Because after all, the recording medium - a movie file - is still compressed in 8 bits only! Even though the captured dynamic range is increased, it still has to go through the low dynamic range bottle neck that is the movie file format. Just that instead of selecting an exposure window, the custom picture style is compressing the dynamic range.

Now, if cameras would support HDR-Video formats like XDepth or HDR-MPEG, it could be done right. They would be capable to retain every bit the sensor captured, enabling grading with a similar quality you're expecting from RAW image editing. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Site updates:

I have switched the commenting system over to Disqus. What I used previously, Haloscan, was so outdated that the company I signed up for it doesn't even exist anymore... The good thing is, that Disqus is a much nicer system with all the bells and whistles (like facebook and twitter connectivity), but the downside is that I couldn't figure out yet how to migrate all the previous comments. Which is a shame, really, some of them were really good and informative.

Phuu... Finally.
This was the first complete overhaul of the entire website. Everything works again, better than ever before. What you see now is what I intended the original design to be.

Most notable updates:

Kirt Witte shares more tips and tricks in his HDRI FAQ.

For example, did you know that you you can save post-processing time on your panoramas, when you line up the tripod legs? Later, you will only have to retouch 2 shadows for the nadir, and not 3...


Kirt's HDRI FAQ is not only bigger now, but also more accessible. You can link to any of the answers directly (like I just did with the image above), and there's RSS feeds and a search function in the side bar.


The second-best thing that happened to this website was the

Flash Panorama Gallery.

What was previously just one long page, is now divided in sections. Less messy. Better. Also highlights the best panos on the first page. Whenever a pano is available as sIBL set, you will see a download link appear. Like, on this sIBL-of-the-month. Nice cross-linking, eh? Browsing is a much nicer experience than just grabbing it from the archive - which I've also updated, by the way.

Other than that, you might have noticed new icons and new header images. There's also new links in the sidebar to the HDRI-Handbook translations (he, I'm published in Korean). New sitemap and new embedded search function. New everything.


Happy Halloween!
Christian Bloch