- We've talked about batch processing before
during the stitching process when you have
many, many panoramas to process,
but now that we've done that,
we have many, many bracketed panoramas to process.
So let's talk about how to batch process those
in Photomatix Pro.
In a previous movie, we used batch processing in PTGui Pro
to create bracketed panoramas,
and I promised we would process those brackets
in batch processing using Photomatix Pro.
Let's do that.
I've moved all of my bracketed panoramas
into a single folder, but each of those panoramas
has a different number of brackets,
at least some of them do.
For instance, the first and second panorama
are made up of seven bracketed shots.
As we scroll down, we see that here's one with five brackets
and the next one with four, and then another one with four.
That's okay, we can use the power of Photomatix Pro
to figure out which ones go together.
Let's open Photomatix Pro,
and I can click Batch Bracketed Photos here
or go into the Automate menu, or command B.
Here's our batch processing of bracketed photos dialogue.
First thing I'll do is go ahead and choose a folder
that I want to process, and that's called Batch Results.
In this bracket selection, if all of my panoramas were
made up of the same number of brackets,
I could just choose that number here.
But in our case, we have different amounts of brackets
making up each.
So I'll use this advanced selection and click options.
Looking through those panoramas, I recall that
the smallest number of brackets was four,
but that's not one of the options here,
because most cameras shoot brackets at uneven numbers.
We can check this box to say that brackets may have
an even number of frames and choose four,
and the largest number of brackets was seven.
Okay, the default between the two successive
bracketed frames is two seconds,
and that's going to be fine,
because we used rapid auto-exposure bracketing and shooting.
The second section allows us to eliminate
some of the bracketed frames if we want to.
We're not going to check that here.
Click OK, and look at some of our other options.
What destination do we want for our processed images?
We'll create a subfolder within the normal source folder.
This is a demonstration, so we're just going to
create jpegs and we'll use the default quality of 80.
If I wanted to create a 32-bit unprocessed merged file,
I can do that here, that way I have that 32-bit file
which I can load later in Photomatix Pro
and then tone map it.
Okay, here's where I choose the settings
that I want to apply.
I usually like to apply fusion here,
because it's good more in general.
If I choose other kinds of processing methods,
it may not apply as well to different types of images.
Someone used a natural preset.
The natural preset is the default value for exposure fusion.
If I wanted to, I could apply multiple kinds of settings
at one time by using custom settings or multiple presets.
In fact, let's go ahead and do that.
We already chose our natural preset, we'll click add,
and that gets populated down here in this window.
If I want to apply a different setting as well,
then I can do that here.
I'll change the filter to use, say,
a contrast optimizer preset, and we'll use balanced.
If I want to create custom settings, I'll do that here.
Let's go ahead and add one more,
just because we're doing a nice demo here,
and we'll use details enhancer.
We'll choose something a little bit stronger here
just to show the differences that are possible.
In Painterly, we'll get something
a little bit silly-looking most likely.
Click OK.
I would like to add some Ghost Removal here,
because I noticed there were some people
moving around in these scenes.
Under More Merge Options, I can choose some details.
We didn't apply alignment here, so that won't matter.
Ghost Removal Advanced Setting, well,
let's go ahead and apply the medium standard amount,
and leave the base exposure as the middle one,
and click OK.
And down here, we can apply
a little bit of post-processing if we want to.
Again, because we're doing a very general demo,
I'll just apply some mild contrast and mild sharpening,
and we'll click on Run.
So you can see in this window below
that it's chosen the first seven images,
so it's identified the first set of bracketed images,
and it's loading them and processing them.
We've created ourselves a relatively lengthy process,
because it is applying
quite a few different settings to each set.
So far, I can see that it's loaded the images,
it's processed the natural preset, the balance preset,
and the painterly preset, and it's moving on
to the second set of images.
We're going to see the same thing for each set,
and we can even watch the results come in
if we go back to our source folder.
This is where our results are being saved.
So we already see the first three.
If we look through our thumbnails, we can see the names
of the presets added to the file names.
This one is balanced, natural,
and as expected, a kind of crazy look from painterly.
And finally, our .hdr,
in case we want to load the hdr into Photomatix later
and tone map that.
Moving back to Photomatix,
it tells us it's batching in the icon,
and continues the list down in the bottom right.
Alright, when our batch is finished, we can move back over
and look in our folder and see all the results.
Just looking through quickly and see similar results
when I'm using the balance preset versus the natural preset,
and of course, the going-too-far painterly preset.