[HDR-photo] Starting out...

[Bernhard Vogl]

Thanks to Mark for pointing out the major difference!

My previous post was meant assuming high quality panoramic imaging. All 
the pro's and con's would go too far to be discusses here so you may 
want to look on some examples to see the difference:
Compare the following panoramas: (sorry, once again the Vienna subway...):

- in 2006 i used an automatic panohead solution to capture bracketed 
images. The middle exposure was stitched and the remaining 2 brackets 
used the template from the middle exposure. All 3 exposures were then 
merged to an HDR and tonemapped back to an LDR:
As you can seein the following link (the 2006 images!), the panoramas 
lack "crispyness":
http://www.austria-360.at/wien/ubahn/donaukanal/index.html
...especially if you compare them to my latest HDR panoramas from the 
Praterstern which were created with the method(s) described in the 
former mail (the 2007 images!):
http://www.austria-360.at/wien/ubahn/praterstern/index.html

I'm still using the "Stitch/merge" workflow - as Mark described - for 
low resolution (e.g. lightprobes), because i also see a slight advantage 
in ease of handling.

>
> So, yes this is a workable solution (and far more predictable than 
> tonemapping *before* stitching!), but it requires care and precision 
> when shooting the panorama frames, and moving objects will most 
> probably show up as "ghosts." It works well for my static landscapes, 
> in any case! IMHO, any tonemapping done *before stitching* negates the 
> effectiveness of the best tonemapping operators, since the full image 
> (and its final HDR pixels) are not being considered. Also, the 
> tonemapping decisions you make as an artist are similarly myopic, 
> since you are not seeing the full image either!
>
This is why i mentioned that HDR stitching would be an extended workflow 
based on the LDR stitching. If you don't like the outcome, just 
re-stitch the panorama with the HDR images. No additional work needed, 
just a little more computing power  ;-)

Best regards
Bernhard