Sunday, November 21, 2010

First HDR Panorama!

As can be seen from the picture below, I managed to stitch my first HDR panorama this past week :-).

Nothing to write home about; I'm not too sure I like the HDR results in this particular image as the foreground is somewhat oversaturated and there's a halo effect around some of the stones and rocks. Still; this is really down to my lack of experience with HDR and the quality of the original exposures making up the stitch in the first place.

I guess the above image is more of a 'proof of concept'; that is that stitching HDR panoramas is possible and actually quite easy!

The trick is to generate the tonemapped HDR images first and then stitch those together. I was previously trying to (somehow) generate three photostitches at different exposures and then combine those. Though this should also be possible in some way, it can be extremely messy and I didn't have any luck myself. It's much easier to have all the source images as tonemapped HDRs and then just perform one photostitch of all of them. For some reason I originally thought that, due to the noise etc. introduced by tonemapping/HDR, the photostitching software would have difficulty stitching tonemapped images together. I couldn't have been more wrong; in fact the photostitching result of the above tonemapped/HDR panorama are considerably better than the equivalent photostitch from the normal images.

One thing I found very handy is Photomatix's batch processing feature. Since I had loads of source images making up the panorama, I simply tested and tuned the tonemapping results for one of the images and then subsequently used batch processing to do the same for all the source images making up the panorama. That done, I left the PC to do the number crunching for an hour or so and came back to find tonemapped/HDR tiff files that I could then stitch together!

Neat feature this.

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