My Autopano Pro forum

Sorry, I'd like to help you but your information seems lacking any basics.
I let others to understand what you don't say.

there is an option when you are processing your files in PM to set the color space in the batch processing

I have attached an image, as they say and image can say a 1000 words, so i'll spare you :-)

good luck

Hi Rory,

I feel your pain :-) this HDRI and Pano, isn't for the faint hearted...certainly takes some time to get ones head wrapped around it, I am struggling just like you.

I am doing similar size pano's, I mean why start small when you can go big :-) but I am using Dual DualCore Opteron 285's with 8gb of ram and a handfull or 8 scsi raid arrays. my Virtual Memory once went up to 22GB+ ...machine hasn't crashed, APP has and it has almost brought it down on its knees :-)
so I would say that you would very likely have some issues with only 2GB of ram.

Anyway, I am getting very mixed results, from PM to APP or PTGui or straight to APP, even converted the files first to jpeg, tiff and tried with either of them, but I am still getting very strange color shifts. The stitching is fine 98% good....you would have to look damn hard to find them...but we do :-) not that I am complaining, this is so much better compared to 6 years ago when I look at all this last time around...APP is gift from heaven!

best of luck - if you find a solution, please advise us all about it, and I will likewise share here

Henrik

rorytheherb wrote:

ok.  i have some files that are in the .hdr radiance format, which is 32 bit.  apparently APP can stitch together .hdr files, since that is on their list of compatible files and this seems consistent with various threads on this forum.  when i import my .hdr files, it gives the error that i quoted above: "warning: cannot read some files. greyscale images or cmyk images are not supported." 

so what i want to know is how/if .hdr files can be greyscale or cmyk images, and what i can do differently to render my .hdrs in a way that APP can import them, so that APP can stitch them together. 

when in photomatix pro, in the batch processing wizard, where i generate the hdrs, i don't see any detailed option concerning what color space the .hdr files are rendered in.  i didn't even know 32 bit files were in a color space!? 

anyhelp appreciated

thanks

rory

Hey rory!

handling .hdr depends on what you want as result.

as i understand your writing you shoot bracketed jpg and make .hdr out of them in Photomatix?
Besides you are making spheres for using them as native .hdr as GlobalLigthting aka Radiosity and such things using them in 3D programs there´s absolutely no sense to render spheres as .hdr.

The best way for "normal" photography is to hdr the bracketed images in Photomatix first and save the tonemapped hdr-images as tiff 16bit and THEN put the tiffs in APP.

IF you really NEED to have .hdr-spheres you put ALL your bracketed set into APP, select "layers as bracketed" in the editor and in the render-dialogue render 3 seperate panos - one 0, one -2 and one +3.
Add the "magic" %L in the output-line and you´ll get 3 smartblended panos which - in my experiences - are kongruent. THESE "bracketed" panos you put in Photomatix and let it generate ONE .hdr-file which you ONLY can use in 3D programs as GL or background (if it´s highres enough).

This is to workaround the problem that APP´s smartblend can´t render .hdr (at least in my 1.4. version) - multiband can . . but . . . .

Again: for "normal" use it´s better to stitch already tonemapped pictures - that means the process i described above: shoot bracketed, use Photomatix to produce .hdr, tonemap the .hdr in Photomatix and save as 16bit-TIFF, stitch 16bit-TIFF in APP and optimize the output-TIFF in Photoshop. Then use (on Macs) CubicConverter to make a QT-sphere.

It really doesn´t make big sense to render .hdr in APP for other reasons as to use them in 3D- and animation-progs for GL and such things.

best, Klaus

P.S.: .HDR ALWAYS means RGB! NEVER gray or CMYK.

P.S.2: i very often have panos - spheres or rectangulars - with 200-300 shots x3. No problem to handle even on my now 4 years old Mac 2x2GHz IBM-G5 processors and 8GB RAM.
Th only problem rises when i have to use geometrical global analyse and optimisation in the editor - this takes some time. BUT - with a correct setup while shooting you wouldn´t need to do much optimization/correction.

Last edited by klausesser (2008-08-06 17:40:15)

interesting ronald-- yes i am trying to avoid stitching the a;ready-tone-mapped images because, well, those aren't all the tones!

klausseser- i am not doing anything 3d with spheres--only interested in cool looking tone-mapped "regular photos"

the problenm is that with upwards of 60 photos per pano times three exposures, photoshop, photomatix AND autopano ALL end up pooping out at me at some stage when I do it "the right way"

ronald-  when you combine all images in one big tiff for every exposure, do you use autopano to do this?  ending up with say three big tiffs do you do each tiff separately?  (when I try to load all of them in one session and arrange by shutterspeed the program freaks out)

if done separately, are these big tiffs truly aligned so that they are all tight on top of each other?  are the files not too big to load into photomatix? 

i think i remember trying to load something into photomatix and it complaining that it was too large

i see you made the exposures from single raws... my shots are done from separate shutters... and on a bridge with traffic (shaking?) so maybe i won't have as much luck, but worth a try---i will keep you posted!

If you want the results of your HDR images to match then you should bracket your shots in manual mode.  Ensure that your white balance is not in AWB (automatic white balance mode) It doesn't matter if it is exact, just that the white balance is the same for every shot.  Shoot RAW along with jpegs in case you need to adjust the exposure later.
Manual exposure (this takes some practice, your first results may not be good)
  A. Use a reflective light meter (spot meter works better)
      Take a test bracket of a light and dark area and examine the results along with histogram
  B. If no light meter use the cameras meter and pan the camera around observing the min,max, avg settings
      Take a test bracket of a light and dark area and examine the results along with histogram
  C. If you are shooting at sunset or fast changing light conditions, use aperture priority to ensure you get the shot.  I am not fast enough to always get the shot in manual mode at sunset.  (Autopano saves you here, better than enfuse)

If your goal is to produce natural looking images that more closely aproximate what you see with your eye, you should use reduce the settings of the changes that you apply to your images.  Compare this to any noise reduction or sharpening that you would normally use to transform your images.  If you apply too much noise reduction you will lose details and make your image appear soft.  If you sharpen your image too much the image will not look natural.  If you need to improve the lighting quickly without spending too much time, using the blending feature of photomatix with the blending point set at -2 and apply these changes to your images as a batch job.  These settings will yield better and natural looking images without much effort.  An excellent book that was just published is Mastering HDR Photography by Michael Freeman.  This book explains an immense amount of practical language in a small amount of space.  I would say that this book is essential if you want to make significant progress.  Other tools that you should be using are tufuse.

The openEXR .exr format was developed by Florian Kainz, Wojciech Jarosz, and Rod Bogart at ILM (industrial light magic) in 2000. openEXR is probably a better choice of file formats. for HDRI and color space precision.  The format is has GPU support by ATI and Nvidia when the feature "CG shader language" is available.  There is good compression such as PIZ (wavelett and huffman encoding).  There is a 32 bit variant, but the "half" data type 16 bits ( 1 sign, 10 mantissa, 5 exponent = 16 bits ) gives you what you need in a smaller file size.  Photomatix 3.0 will output openEXR files and Photoshop CS3 will open openEXR as well as radiance files. (1)
+ Color space is more precise than radiance
+ dynamic range is about 2^5 = 32 EVs
+ openEXR does not mix color channels like radiance
+ smaller file size
+ supports additional channels (alpha,
+ lossless PIZ compression (wavelet and huffman encoding)
+ other compression standards such as ZIP (lossy but fast)
+ gpu acceleration support "CG shader language" ATI and Nvidia
+ Photomatix 3.0 and Photoshop CS3 support openEXR
1. Bloch, Christian, The HDRI Handbook: High Dynamic Range Imaging for Photographers and CG Artists, rockynook 2007, page 52-54
radiance - An older RGBE raw image file format developed by Greg Ward for his radiance 3d modeling software. It is RGBE with (8 bits red, 8 G, 8 B, 8 bits shared exponent)
2. Bloch, Christian, The HDRI Handbook: High Dynamic Range Imaging for Photographers and CG Artists, rockynook 2007, page 48
3. http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/refer/filefmts.pdf
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiance_(software)
5. http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/the … ode84.html

CMYK - cyan magenta yellow key (black) a subtractive color model used in printing where the combination of inks partially or entirely masks certian colors from white. (6)
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK

Another file formats that are used are
TIFF float (psd similar to this)
TIFF LogLuv 24/32
JPEG-HDR

Christian Bloch's book cited in 1 and 2 is the major secondary source used in this forum post.There is an excellent chart that compares the attributes of various HDR file formats (page 61).  Chapter 6 covers panoramic HDR images.

Michael Freeman has more up to date coverage of the photomatix gui interface and explains HDR concepts and terms in a brief and very accesible manner.  If you are serious about HDR, I would purchase both books.  I consider these books to be essential.  You will be able to understand the research paper better as well.

Last edited by Castillonis (2008-08-11 23:37:36)

Hi rorytheherb,

btw cool qtvr ronald it looks good

Thank!

when you combine all images in one big tiff for every exposure, do you use autopano to do this?

Nope, I use Photoshop for that. I create one big tiff with all the images of the pano side by side like image 1.

I do that for every different shutter-speed so I end up with; in my case; 9 big tiffs -4,-3,-2,-1,0,+1,+2,+3,+4. So each big tiff holds all all the different images from the same pano with a certain exposure.

Those images create one HDR what I tonemap, save as 16bit tiff and then cut into individual images. Those images are being stitched by APP.

Bottom link show an other pano done with the same workflow
http://www.ronaldtichelaar.nl/Kongsvoll-fjellstue/

Good luck.