When creating a panorama for a scene of huge dynamic range, intuitively I always merge exposure brackets to HDR and tone-map them and then stitch the resulting images into a panorama. My intuition here is that the HDR process is much more predictable than the stitching process, so I start with the former. I realize this may be because I know a lot about HDR (worked on HDR S/W for 9 years) and little about stitching software.
Is this the right order to do this and why?
This question came up because in the book Mastering Panorama Photography the author stitches first and then merges the LDR panoramas into a HDR one. He mentions this but does not explain why.
Answer
Doing HDR first has advantages: the HDR process is working on a smaller image size, and you only have to stitch one set of images.
But the disadvantage of doing the HDR step first is it becomes more difficult to exactly match the tones between sets of images, so when you stitch them together you get more obvious seams. If you are able to control this and don't have this problem, then I could see it being easier to do HDR first. But for most people they will have ended up with slightly different HDR adjustments done and they will have seams to deal with.
Edit: I have recently found that doing the pano stitching step first, sometimes the resulting files have slightly different dimensions, off by a pixel or two, and then the HDR processor complains that the images must be the same dimension.
No comments:
Post a Comment