- In the last chapter, we output bracketed panoramas.
Now it's time to really take advantage of the power
of this workflow by combining those panoramas
to make HDR panoramas in Photomatix Pro.
Now I want to combine these into HDR.
So again, I will select my three images,
and similarly to PTGui,
I'm gonna drag these over to Photomatix Pro.
First thing it asks me is what I want to do
and that is indeed to merge to HDR Tone Mapping and Fusion.
These are the three images that I chose.
This bottom checkbox isn't necessary
unless you wish to save your 32 bit image.
And I'm going to click that in this case
just to show by example what we're talking about.
Click okay, and I have the merge to HDR options next.
On top, Align source images is not needed
because we've created three perfectly aligned,
registered panoramic images, so that's not needed.
In our panorama we are going to look at the options
to remove ghosts, that's because of those moving people,
so this is the perfect tool for this project,
one reason I would use Photomatix Pro for it.
Noise reduction isn't necessary,
we've done that in our workflow already.
Same goes for reducing chromatic aberrations,
so I'm going to click the Show Deghosting Options button.
That's going to go ahead and load us a preview image
that gives us a chance to move around the image
and either choose Automatic Deghosting,
in which it's going to choose for us
which areas of the images contain moving objects
and it's going to try to remove them for us.
This way we can choose one base photo,
and the amount of power for the deghosting needed,
and that will give us a preview in this main window.
In this small screen I'm gonna resize it
so we see all of our options at the bottom.
I can zoom in to see the results of how well it's doing.
Now it's a very low res preview,
so it isn't always that easy to see.
But it does look like it did a pretty good job.
Now again, since we're doing demonstration here,
I want to show the better option,
and the better option depends on what you want to do.
Again, if we're making a fun panorama where we don't have
to worry about every little detail being perfect,
then maybe the automatic deghosting is good.
However, anywhere that deghosting is avoidable is better.
You should always avoid deghosting because
the deghosted area is only using one of the source images
and therefore is not really HDR anymore in that area.
So let's choose the Selective Deghosting.
And now that's going to let us choose
the areas that we want deghosted.
So let's start over here on the left side of our image.
I'm just gonna go ahead and draw right around
one of our examples again.
And I have the Quick selection mode checked.
If I uncheck that, now I need to draw around an area,
right click, and select mark as ghosted area.
I find the Quick selection mode usually the most convenient.
Something else we do right now is we can right click
and we can choose which of the source images
is used for the deghosting.
I'm going to choose the middle one,
I feel like the overexposed one is going to be too much.
I can do that to any or all of these.
Usually, it will more often choose the middle one,
so in those two cases I thought it would have.
This time it did, it shows a zero EV option.
All these people are basically in the same
lighting kind of situation,
so I'm just going to draw around all of them at once.
And I see that it also again shows the zero EV.
Same over here, I'll find a nice spot
to cut through the crowd, so to speak,
just grab big groups of them if I can.
This does take a little more time but again,
it will not apply deghosting to all the other areas.
So the full panorama will not be deghosted,
only these little areas that I'm circling.
Just take a minute to grab these people.
Just group by group, pretty good way to go.
Any problems can happen if there are moving objects
at the edges of the image, luckily we don't have that here.
The people far out here, sure, why not deghost them too?
If you want to you can right click and check these.
I will go ahead and let the exposure
chosen by Photomatix Pro, I'll go ahead and leave that.
Maybe it's making a good decision using the minus two image
for those people that are far away from the camera.
I'll use a zero here.
Alright, once that's done, whether you choose the automatic
deghosting or selective deghosting, we'll click okay.
And now it's going to put together
our image in order to tone map.
Okay, after the HDR merge is done,
it's showing us now that 32 bit image,
because we checked the option so that it would show.
Normally, by default, Photomatix Pro
will skip this step altogether.
It's an unprocessed image,
so it's not really even an image yet.
It's showing us something that cannot
even be shown on a screen.
The reason to show this and to save it
is that we can then load that image and tone map it,
having skipped the steps of loading our source images
and doing the deghosting step.
So let's go ahead and save it, File, Save As.
I'll just save it to my desktop to be quick.
What I want to point out here are the file formats
that you'll notice look a little unusual
if you haven't used 32 bit files before.
Radiance, OpenEXR, and Floating Point TIFF.
Those are all 32 bit files which again,
are used for data and not as images.
So they need to be tone mapped.
We're just going to go ahead and save it as the most popular
file format, which is the Radiance, dot HDR.
And that's available to be loaded again later.
If we hadn't checked that box,
to show the intermediary two bit file,
then we would have seen this.
I just hit Command T to bring back Tone Mapping.
So here we see a preview image
of the tone mapped 32 bit file.
I like to tell people that if
you plan to post process your image,
it's great to use Tone Mapping,
which you see up here in the top left.
And the most popular method of
tone mapping is the Details Enhancer.
There are other methods of tone mapping as well,
and they all have their purposes, their uses.
People prefer different methods.
The details enhancer I find to be the most powerful.
The whole purpose of tone mapping an image
is to bring those very bright areas and very dark areas
toward the middle so they're not so bright and so dark.
If you look at the histogram here at the bottom left,
we see that that's been accomplished.
All of the information is pushed toward the middle.
The result of that is often a rather flat looking image,
and it sometimes doesn't look very photographic anymore.
If you'd rather skip post processing steps,
then I recommend you use Exposure Fusion,
right under Tone Mapping.
And usually that's the Fusion/Natural option.
The Fusion/Interior is for an interior scene
that has a bright window view.
So we'll leave it at Fusion/Natural,
and you can see the results are photographic right away.
So many times, that's a better option.
In this case I'm going to go back to the default settings
which is Details Enhancer and just choose a few options
that are best for this panorama.
With resizing the window, so I can see the whole thing
at once, including the presets.
The presets can be really helpful if you're new
to Photomatix and you want to find out
really what it's capable of doing.
For us, we're just going to make a few small adjustments
before we move on to the post processing step.
It's usually advisable to leave the strength setting
at the default at least to start with
until you find a reason to change it.
And I don't wish to go through each one of these sliders.
That's a whole other topic.
But what we can do here are the things
that are important for panoramas.
And that is mostly this 360 degree box,
all the way down here at the bottom,
and that's going to ensure that the sides have even settings
and that when we view it interactively there won't be
a line, there can be a line, a seam going from
top to bottom should you not choose that box.
If I didn't click my 360 degree box for this panorama,
I would have a seam that would look just like this,
going right from top to bottom on my panorama.
I'm going to leave most of the settings
very close to being the default, but I do like to check
if the Smooth Highlights make a difference because
that usually helps with this kind of halo effect here,
but actually when I look back at the source images,
I can do that in Bridge,
you can see that that's actually part
of what we see in the source image,
that brighter area there next to the horizon.
That's just due to the time of day that we were shooting.
So actually I think that's pretty realistic
at the default settings as well, I'm gonna put that back.
Okay, for a demonstration like this,
I don't want to get too much into personal preference on it,
so I'm gonna go ahead and choose the default settings
just for the 360 degree box chosen,
and then click apply.
Once it's finished rendering the image
with the Details Enhancer method, we see our finished image.
And you can see right away that there's no areas
that are completely too bright or completely too dark.
From the sky and the bright areas along the horizon,
where it's most bright, all the way down to where
the Abraham Lincoln Memorial is, inside the memorial.
Everything is viewable now.
So let's go ahead and use the Contrast section
just to bring back a little bit of those dark details
that make an image really look like an image.
We can use Medium Contrast, Light Contrast,
and it lets us, of course, customize as we like.
Again I'm keeping settings rather light
during this demonstration,
so I'm going to choose the mild contrast.
You can go over here to the color tab,
and let's bring up the saturation of blue for the sky,
it's always nice.
We can also bring up some of the yellow saturation
for some of those nice tree lined along the horizon.
Just some small changes, just for demonstration.
And Sharpening, yes, by all means,
we'll do some Mild Sharpening.
And click done.
So now if I don't wish to go out to an outside application,
my panoramic is done, I can save it from here,
and we'll talk about how we're going to
display that panorama in another movie.