Question
During a recent wedding, I took a number of shots with my Nikon D90 at different exposures, hoping to merge them into HDR pictures. However, it was done in a hurry, i.e. with no auto-bracketing or tripod, etc. The images are of people standing, with bright sky as background.
When I use Hugin's align_image_stack command to align the images, and enfuse to do an exposure merge, the resulting image has a noticeable border around where the background (sky) merged with my subject like this:
Is this a problem with the alignment? It is possible that both my subject and my hands moved a little bit between the shots.
In any case, is there a way to salvage these photos so that I can still merge them into a correctly exposed shot?
I have access to Hugin, GIMP, and pfstools right now.
Answer
I would align the pictures by hand in GIMP before attempting the HDR processing. Just load them all in layers, pick one as a reference then transform the others to match. You may need to translate, rotate and/or scale to achieve the best alignment. If a perfect alignment is not possible, then favor the high-contrast border areas, like where the sky meets the horizon, trees, etc.
Then do the HDR processing with these manually aligned pictures, skipping the align_image_stack step. Hopefully you'll get a better result that way.
If the people moved between shots (more than likely they did) and that resulted in blurring, then bring into GIMP that blurry tonemapped shot along with one of your source images, the one where the people is best exposed. Do manual surgery in GIMP to insert the people from the good LDR shot into the tonemapped picture.
Good luck.
Check more discussion of this question.
No comments:
Post a Comment