In June 2016 I purchased a
copy of HDR Projects 4 “Pro” in the hope of better deghosting of my HDR images. That hope
seems to have been fulfilled, but at what cost?
TL;DR
In summary, my experience has been:
The program runs relatively quickly, much faster than my previous methods.
The GUI is really bizarre.
They much-hyped “automatic recognition” of components of HDR images does not work. At
all.
The gradation of the output images is gaudy in the extreme.
There is no way to save complete image profiles. You can either merge two (possibly
more) gaudy base profiles, or adjust the profile for a single image and then lose it.
The same applies to the batch settings.
User interface
HDR Projects 4 is a Microsoft space program, of course, so it requires excessive manual
operations. Every weekend I take 5 360°
panoramas of my garden with a
fisheye lens, requiring 4 views for the complete circle. Each view is an HDR image
made from 3 component images. In addition there are 2 180° panoramas, for a total of 24
images—if I don't need extras for things like the sun. My previous system used a series of
scripts that invoked Hugin components enfuse and align_image_stack, which doesn't do deghosting.
With the cheaper versions of HDR Projects, you need to convert every single image
manually. Not worth the trouble. But HDR Projects Pro has a batch mode, and that's
what I'm looking at here. More details here.
The batch processing module is very strange. It offers:
Automatic allocation: Loads all of the images and based on the images' content, locates
those that belong to an exposure bracketing series. The brightness as well as the coverage
are compared, which results in very good automatic recognition.
Based on my experience, this is just plain wrong. I have never found any collection of
images that it can handle correctly. It seems quite happy to merge completely unrelated
images, such as these four:
I tried to contact their support department, but if they have one, they have hidden it
well. I sent email to the contact address and received no reply.
My workaround
With a lot of experimentation, I have found a way to use this software anyway:
Create a directory with only the files I need, linked from the source directory.
Name the files starting with their time_t modification timestamp. This enables
me to select “groups of three” in the batch setup menu.
If the modification timestamp of a file is one second more than the modification
timestamp of the previous file, use the previous timestamp. This is not necessary to
ensure the correct choice of images, but if I don't, it creates really bizarre output
file names.
In HDR Projects, select:
Batch processing (Ctrl-B).
Allocation: Three-image grouping
Result format: TIFF 16-Bit (*.tiff)
360-degree panorama mode (where appropriate)
HDR default settings: Entropy (very soft)
Post-processing: Custom Garden-photos-set
Select “Start” and select the source directory. No images will be displayed.
Select the destination directory. No images will be displayed. The images are then
displayed, upside down, and then processed. If you have to restart the conversion,
you need to re-set most of these options.
When conversion is done, use another script on the FreeBSD box to rename the result files to something
sane.
At the end, use exiftool to reinstate the EXIF data.
The results are still too gaudy. This is the best I can manage, including preprocessing the
images to be less saturated. Run the cursor over either image to
compare with the partner, and click to see a larger version:
