camera raw/pseudo HDR

[nobody]

Often, I have had enough dynamic range in a set of single RAW images for a good panorama, but a single exposure correction is inadequate within a single image for the problem (ie. the brighter window in a dimmer room). As always, less source images are usually less trouble.

Hugin workflow in this case for me has been either: a) Use command-line TuFuse.exe in conjunction with dcraw.exe to automatically make several TIFF's from each single RAW image in the panorama and automatically combine them in a manner similar to enfuse and then feed the combined TIFFs into Hugin. --OR-- b) manually create 3 TIFFs for each RAW and stack them in hugin for enfusing within hugin.

Would it be possible to automatically accept some form of RAW format (or even 16-bit tiffs) and have enfuse create autobracketed stacked images for fusion (similar to tufuse)and have them automatically be stacked within hugin (since they will be aligned already)?

Greg
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[kristiankjaer (kristiankjaer)]

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I'll second that request!

Kristian Kjær

[Lukas Jirkovsky (l-jirkovsky)]

I think this one would be really nice to have. It could be done using dcraw to create tiff.

[Bruno Postle (brunopostle)]

If splitting RAW files for exposure fusion is generally useful (and I think it is), then this is a feature that should be added to RAW converters such as ufraw instead of hugin.

Similarly, hugin is never going to be a RAW converter with all the options of a tool such as ufraw, so I would be wary of adding half-baked RAW support to hugin that produced second-rate results.

Something that ought to work very well would be if hugin/enblend could support RAW output, specifically 'linear DNG'. In this workflow, hugin would import RAW via dcraw as 16bit linear data with no correction. It would then output linear DNG files which could be opened in any RAW converter for further tweaking.

This would be a good summer of code project: modify hugin to use dcraw as input plugin, integrate TCA correction, modify enblend to write linear DNG, modify hugin GUI to enable it, fix any ufraw bugs reading linear DNG.

[zachmckracken (zachmckracken)]

Wouldn't the problem be solved if hugin could work with 16 bit or (even better) 32 Floating-point images? Would there still be a need to split and fuse raw images?
Then you could just feed it with 16 bit tiffs or hdr images acquired or produced somewhere else.
Even cooler side effect: If any image is directly converted to 32 bit float before exposure compensation and blending, this might eliminate the need to have exposure "stacks", which gives the option to shoot freehand panoramas of very dynamic scenes with large overlaps but no exposure series, and still get an HDR result.

Or maybe I'm getting wrong how hugin works?

[Bruno Postle (brunopostle)]

@zach, yes Hugin already supports both 16bit and HDR input files, so you can do most of these things.