Rhythm & Code Blog

Now that we have a .EXR file laying around, it’s time to do some tone mapping. In this part of the series we’ll be looking at a script to tone map that file. Well, actually several scripts. When I prepare a photo from HDR I tend to use several different tone-mapping operators, and then I use the Gimp to combine them into a final image. Here we have scripts for the fattal02, mantiuk06, and reinhard05 operators of the pfstmo project. Then we have a wrapper script to make it easy to run all three tone mapping scripts with one command.

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The next step in the procedure is to generate an HDR format image for each set of 5 images that we organized in Part 1. This part of the series is really very simple. There’s just one simple script to run in each directory that was created in the first part. Don’t worry, at the end of the series we’ll be wrapping it all up with a script to handle stepping through each directory.

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OK, it’s been a loooong time since I’ve done much with the blog. I actually got an email the other day from someone asking if I’d ever gotten around to finishing the series. I was inspired to know that someone had even found it, so I figured I’d get back to work. Thanks Iain! Anyway, over the last year or so the script that I presented in Part 1 has changed a bit, so I thought I should post an update.

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The first step to automating HDR processing is to get your images broken up into sets that you can work with. After going out to shoot pictures I can easily end up with 100 5 shot sets of images. That’s 100 HDR images to produce from 500 source images. File management can get to be a challenge and trying to do it all by hand is very time consuming and error prone. This my process for getting images broken up into sets in an automated way. All of the directories mentioned below are in my main Photos directory.

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The purpose of this article is mainly to server as an outline to myself for the series or posts I need to write to document my current method for automating HDR post-processing. I’m also just trying to get the feel for writing posts and what not. As I write the interesting bits I’ll update this post to link to them. Each documented step will contain links to any software needed. Off the top of my head I know that you’ll need pfstools , pfsCalibration, PFStmo, openexr, qpfstmo, qtpfsgui, and optionally cinepaint.

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Well, I’ve finally gotten around to setting up a real blog portion of my site. This article was already there, and titled “Hello world!” when the system fired up and I nearly deleted it, but then I realized that I have to have a first post, and this seems as good as any. Fitting, really, since I’m a programmer and every introduction to every programming language ever invented starts of with an example which reads to the computer something like this:

Hi computer, as soon as you have time please print out the words “Hello world!” and then stop. By doing so you will convince me that I have the power to control you.

Thanks,
Programmer

Anyway, this is my first post. There are many like it, but this one is mine. If everything goes according to plan I’ll be posting some stuff soon about HDR processing, more specifically the automation of HDR processing. After getting a new camera (Olympus SP 550-UZ (Ultra Zoom)) which does 5 shot auto bracketing I’ve taken about as many HDR shots on three test runs as I had taken in the previous 8 months that I’d been playing with HDR. I’ve discovered that file management is a real pain and just getting everything processed initially to see which ones will be good shots can be very time consuming. I’m working on a few shell scripts to automate the process (BASH shell to be exact, yes I’m a Linux geek).