I'm very happy to welcome HDR Source as official sIBL supporter. It's one of the oldest HDR stores on the web, with a huge library of over 120 sIBLs from a great variety of locations.

The man behind HDR Source is Charles Leo, who works in architectural visualization himself and is well known in the VRay community. Check out Lunar Studio for some breathtaking renderings! Maybe that's why his HDR libraries are so popular - because they just work.

Charles also wrote some great tutorials on setting up Smart IBL in MAX and rendering with Linear Workflow in VRay. I think that speaks volumes for his expertise.

To kick things off right, Charles friendly provided 7 promo-sIBLs for you. Very awesome!



Literally spent 30 seconds on this: I just grabbed a random object from our Eden FX asset library, and loaded up the Hotel Lookout sIBL. Rotated and moved the environment until I found a nice composition, and hit render. No adjustments to lighting or render settings, no post processing, it came out just like that... Which confirms: The lighting in the sIBL-sets from HDR Source certainly is in tune. The render may not be perfect, but clearly a great starting point.

2010.
We managed to get through the icky single-digits into the era of real science fiction. Hurray!

Let me start with a quick review of last year.

2009 has been pretty busy year in the HDR market.

• Photomatix and FDR Tools have matured a lot. Both have polished their Photoshop Plugins which has helped workflow integration.

• Picturenaut has become a real challenger to the commercial HDR packages, with its new interface and features. And thanks to your generous support it's still free.

• At least 4 new HDR programs entered the market, among them HDR Photostudio representing a real milestone.

• The Promote Control came out, the first professional remote controller to bring advanced bracketing to Canon and Nikon cameras.

That's all great. But let's rather look forward. At the chance to leaning myself way out the window, here's my...

Predictions for 2010

Dolby is likely to build an HDR display that will blow everyone away.
Nowadays every display company has at least one flagship model with Local Dimming technology. Their software is proprietary, tech specs are confusing to downright misleading, driver support to display real HDR content is non-existent. Dolby, having signed up the original inventors, will rule them all by creating the reference HDR display device. It will likely be ungodly expensive, but Dolby will license the tech out to the others, who will have to bite the bullet and obey. Because once established, consumers will look out for the Dolby Vision Logo sticker.


Microsoft will push hard on JPEG XR.
This highly flexible HDR format, formerly known as WDP or HD Photo, has real potential to become the workhorse of consumer-friendly HDR hardware. I imagine it to become a third option in cameras. The dynamic range of a RAW file, but the size and simplicity of a JPEG file. Sounds like the best of both worlds, doesn't it? And since the JPEG comite approved JPEG XR as official standard, there's no license restrictions. Hardware vendors just need an incentive to use it. As Windows 7 with full JPEG XR support gains more ground in 2010, all it takes is user demand and one daring underdog to jump ahead to unleash an avalanche of JPEG XR capable cameras.


Of course, these predictions are based on pure speculations. I'm curious myself if they actually turn into realities.

But I'm absolutely sure about my....

Plans for 2010

Steve Chapman is joining the HDRLabs family, contributing one of the most exciting projects to date. His infamous PanoCamera is going Open Source, a truly universal DSLR remote controller for handheld platforms. We're feverishly working on the documentation right now, so watch this space in January!

Smart IBL will continue to grow, on the software support side as well as the available content. Charles Leo from HDR Source has just joined the ranks of sIBL set vendors, expect some really awesome sample sets in the near future. Here's a taste of his 120+ sets...

And most importantly, I will be working on the second edition of the HDRI Handbook. It will probably take me all year, and it will be a very comprehensive update.


Happy New Year to all of you,
and Happy Shooting / Stitching / Rendering in 2010!

Christian Bloch

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.