Some Hard Work

[Polar01]

Been taking images in the local churchs for a 150th booket being put out by our town. I have two images, shot on different days, in the case of both images I had to shoot once for the glass and then again for the insides as they were 5 stops difference. Both images were created from 5 shot pans, in the case of the first one, 5 shots for the inside, and then the 5 shots for the glass, ran through Photomerge, and then I blended the two pans together, I was luck as both sets of panned images lined up.

Image #1



With the second image, I had a different problem here the 5 shots of the glass did not want to run through Photomerge, as the insides shots did. So here I had to blend both the glass shot and inside shot as single images, once all 5 were done I was able to run through Photomerge to create the pan that you see

Image #2



What I am look for is some C&C along with suggestions as to how I might improve the process of getting the glass and insides blended as these took a long time as I did it by cutting the blowen glass out of the inside images so the glass from the correct exposed image could come up through.

Cheers:

Allan

[Donald]

Sorry I cannot be of help here Allan, as I would go for what you have done - blending images with a paintbrush to reveal correctly exposed windows through blown ones.

I will be really interested to read what others say though, as this could be valuable learning for many of us. I recently visited Brechin Cathedral here in Scotland (just because I'd never been before) and was amazed by the windows in the place (it is known for those). I really got the notion of seeking permission to shoot inside and would want to get both the windows and the interior structures, because they are very old and magnificent.

So, I shall follow this thread with great interest.

[gcowan]

Hi Allan,

Nice images. I think there are two ways of doing this, one the way you seem to have done using layers and the paint brush technique. The second that I know of is use PTGUI Pro software. This allows you to combine all of the images in one go and use an HDR technique at the same time as sticking together a panorama. It also allows you to choose the way the final image is projected.
The software site has some tutorial videos, and Sekonic have some really good instructional videos on getting the exposure right for the HDR effect. You can choose to do a naturalistic approach as you have done or a real HDR look.
The other nice thing PTGUi Pro allows you to do is to keep the images in layers and change the way all of the blending is done. This is a bit advanced for me at present but I will get around to it when I have a similar problem to yours.

PTGui Pro is really worth every cent if you are doing images like this fairly often. You can down load it from the net. It doesn't seem to work as a plug in for Photoshop but the files it creates ( I use TIFF) can be loaded into PS either as a blended image or as a layered image.

Good luck with it.
Graham

[FrankMi]

Hi Allan. From what I think you are saying, you have, in reality, the combination of two sets of images that are five EV's apart. If your goal is to get a more homogeneous look to the colour in the windows (and as a by-product, pick up better details in the altar), you might want to get three sets of images that are about 2EV apart, so in this case I would use +2.5EV, 0EV and -2.5EV.

I usually find that with indoor images that have sunlight involved I need more like +4EV, +2EV, 0EV, -2EV and -4EV to get smooth exposure and colour tone transitions. For me, it is far easier to use Photomatix Pro tonemapping to get the smooth range of both exposure and color tone, then blend the tonemapped image back into the 0EV image as appropriate.

[Polar01]

Frank: I did try running the two images through both photomatix 4.1.4 and the Nik HDR programs, colours were way off. What I am going to post are two of the images I used both are after I processed them in Adobe Raw, these are the starting point of where I started blending. In the large first image, I overlayed the lighter image over the darker than used lighten setting to get the final image. For the second image I had one on one layer and the other on a second layer, with the glass cut out so it would show through from the bottom layer.

Processed Raw Image for Glass



Processed Raw Image for Insides



Cheers:

Allan

[Jack R Mann]

Great shots love the tech info you all have come up with, still over my head but keep trying thanks to you all.