Background Exposure

I’ve finally updated my gallery to include photos from Ireland and Switzerland. Here is one that wouldn’t fit:

It’s a panoramic HDR image taken at night, which doesn’t sound so difficult. I certainly didn’t think it would be very difficult while I was taking the 33 shots that went in to it. The problem is that you can’t create the HDRs individually and then stitch them together because each combined section will be anywhere from subtlely to hugely different than the others. In the end, I had to…

1. load each set of 3 images as layers in photoshop
2. align them
3. crop the image to the minimum area covered by all layers
4. save the layered file
5. save the brightest layer as “a.tif”
6. repeat steps 1-5 for all image groups, output to b.tif, c.tif, … k.tif
7. load images a.tif … k.tif into PTGui
8. create points, optimize, adjust, and generate a panorama: x.tif
9. save PTGui project
10. open all the PSD files from step #4, this time saving the middle layers as images a.tif … k.tif
11. load PTGui project
12. touch nothing — generate again, saving as y.tif
13. repeat steps 10 to 12, saving the darkest layers and generating the panorama z.tif
14. load x.tif, y.tif, and z.tif in to whatever HDR program you use
15. watch it crash from lack of memory
16. load x.tif, y.tif, and z.tif in to Photoshop and shink them
17. load x.tif, y.tif, and z.tif in to whatever HDR program you use and go (remember that they’re already aligned)

See… Easy! Of course, the pano was too large for EasyHDR to handle and Photoshop (CS2, anyway) does a terrible job in comparison. I had to scale x, y, and z by 50% in each direction before it could load and process it.

Of course, all this was done for the same reason you climb a mountain: Because it’s there. The image is blurry if you look close-up in the original (not posted here) because it was so windy the night I took the photos that I could not keep the camera perfectly still for the long exposures. C’est la vie!