PTGUI - anyone doing panos with HDR?

I am just idly playing with PTgui's HDR function, and am a bit lost in
some aspects. So I'm being lazy and hoping someone may have already
done some work in this area and can give a few quick tips on how best to
set it up.

In particular, a couple of basic questions have arisen - the help file
suggests that 3 sets of images are used - is that correct? It didn't
complain, and seemed to give me a nice, not-unnatural-looking result
using just *two* sets:
http://www.marktphoto.com/examples/pano_hdr_test.jpg
however I will concede that this was not a challenging example and
doesn't tell me much. The scene wasn't really pushing the limits anyway..

But do I really need to take 3 sets? - I doubt I would encounter too
many scenes requiring *that* much hdr help.. And how have you set up
the 'Camera Response Curve' and 'Tone Mapping' dialogs, or did you just
leave them as default?

I should probably point out that I do NOT like images that look
unnatural, which seems to apply to a lot of the HDR I've seen (although
Fr McK seemed to have it working nicely - are you still around, Fr McK?
(O

I imagine that if I know what I'm doing I can probably use it a little
more productively and have a bit of control over the result.. (O:

Any hints greatly appreciated. And yes, I've looked at the Tutorial and
a few webpages, but am not feeling much wiser - is it Friday?

In article , Mark Thomas says...

Any hints greatly appreciated. And yes, I've looked at the Tutorial and
a few webpages, but am not feeling much wiser - is it Friday?

I wonder if you could shoot RAW and process to obtain underexposed,
properly exposed and overexposed images from the same file.

In any case there is a forum for PTGUI users:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PanoToolsNG/

There is a thread on HDR going on right now.
--

Alfred Molon
------------------------------
Olympus 50X0, 8080, E3X0, E4X0, E5X0 and E3 forum at
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MyOlympus/
http://myolympus.org/ photo sharing site

Alfred Molon wrote:
In article , Mark Thomas says...

Any hints greatly appreciated. And yes, I've looked at the Tutorial and
a few webpages, but am not feeling much wiser - is it Friday?

I wonder if you could shoot RAW and process to obtain underexposed,
properly exposed and overexposed images from the same file.

Yep, but it all seems a lot of trouble when two sets would probably do..


In any case there is a forum for PTGUI users:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PanoToolsNG/

There is a thread on HDR going on right now.

Thanks for that, I'll check it out.

"Alfred Molon" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...
In article , Mark Thomas says...

Any hints greatly appreciated. And yes, I've looked at the Tutorial and
a few webpages, but am not feeling much wiser - is it Friday?

I wonder if you could shoot RAW and process to obtain underexposed,
properly exposed and overexposed images from the same file.

You can, and at least two of the HDR proggies out there (EasyHDR and
Photomatix) let you create LDR enhancements like this. The advantages are
that you will have no registration issues with moving objects. The
disadvantages are increased noise, especially in dark areas, and lower
overall dynamic range as compared to true HDR (blown highlights are blown
forever). It can work quite well, however.

Toby