Natural HDR - image alignment and de-ghosting

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Craig
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It has been 18 months since I bought my D90 and i'm increasingly experimenting with the bracketing feature. Oloneo trial was great but too expensive. I've also recently moved to OSX and, in addition to transferring my DXO Optics licence over to the Mac, I've been trialling various HDR software packages as well as Aperture 3 and playing with Doubletake (panoramics).

Current workflow:

RAW > DXO optics > TIFF > HDR (if bracketed) > Aperture 3 (trial) > Pixelmator (first App Store purchase!)

My aim is to provide a HDR image which is more natural than some of the photos you will find promoting HDR software. In reality, tweaking some of the sliders in Aperture 3 seem to provide adequate tweaking of the output TIFF for my liking and so really my focus is on a HDR program which is excellent for aligning images and de-ghosting.

I'm aware of Bracketeer but I don't believe it offers de-ghosting and so I've not tried it as yet.

I have used Luminance-HDR (shareware) and Photomatix Lite. On the two different images I used, Photomatix was far better at aligning the images and providing a sharp HDR image. Luminance also was also very clunky.

Hydra plugin for Aperture - so basic it was untrue. I didn't like the alignment either.

HDR Express - simply didn't get on with it and it is quite expensive for what it is.

Nik HDR Flex - simalar alignment results to Photomatix but expensive.


I'm aware that Photoshop has an excellent alignment tool but it is far too expensive for my liking!


At present Photomatix Pro for just under £70 is looking pretty good. However, are there any HDR packages which provide better alignment for the same or less price?

I know there's the align_image_stack functionality within Hugin but that would not solve ghosting issues.
 
Hi Craig,
Good to see a Silhillian on the site :-)

I moved to OSX about 4 years ago. Up to that point I used Photomatix all the time for HDR.
I am not a guru in HDR by any means but that was the one I tried and liked, plus there a lot of tutorials on it for you to follow.

I have just added a HDR plugin to Aperture 3 (Can't remember it's name right now) and it's simply not as good at aligning the photos. Even though I took a bracketed shot with tripod and remote release, they still couldn't line up.
After that I took the photos back to Photomatix and that did a pretty decent job again.

Strangely though, I did grab the Photomatix plugin for Aperture and found that to not be as good as using the full program!!!! Weird.

I personally haven't found anything that is as good or as easy as photomatix.
I will watch this thread to see if any HDR gurus can help, as I would be interested in getting something even better than PM myself. :-)

Nik HDR EFEX Pro does look good to try though
 
:thumbs: There are one or two of us about (ok, so I live in Dickens Heath (from Kenilworth) so I'm not born and bred in Solihull!)

I tried the Nik software and it was comparable to Photomatix but more costly.

Last night I downloaded HDRtist Pro (15 day trial) and it did a great alignment job (it uses the open source align_photo_stack plugin) and for just £20.99 it is looking like a good deal. However, I'm not sure of its de-ghosting capabilities - nothing's mentioned on the website (two person company in Taiwan) so I need to put some photos through it which have clear ghosting.

If HDRtist can't deal with ghosting, Photomatix remains the top candidate.
 
Know Kenilworth well. You're let off then, in that case :-)

Whenever I want to go for a new piece of software, i will always look at the final results you can obtain before thinking anything. If people have done some great final shots then the software has to be capable of achieving it.
This may be of interest to you:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr-tist/

Some natural looking HDR in that lot, some not so but if those results impress you then go for it, as you know it can do it.
I am almost interested in looking at this one myself.
 
I've got a bracketed image I took recently in Norfolk of a rusting tractor with a boat on the back, on the beach. The rusting metal is a good challenge to test alignment (I took the shots handheld with a shaky hand) and all of the HDR packages produce different results out of the box. However, some tweaking can produce similar results and I noticed that you can save your own presets in HDRtist, which appeals.

It is just the ghosting functionality I need to clarify.

SNS-HDR is another package I've yet to try. The website (in Polish) doesn't appeal though....
 
Just explain to me what you mean by ghosting exactly.?
Do you mean when it hasn't aligned properly, it gives you the ghost version around the edge of an object, say?
 
Oh ok that's what you mean OK? :-)

Well form the looks of that review I would suggest Photomatix does it again. OK yeah the colours and impact of the photo looks flat but you can at least change that in other programs.
 
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