Can I extract artificial bracketed images from my (non bracketed) RAW files and have PTGui Pro assemble those into an HDR panorama?
Yes this is possible, but there is no benefit in doing so. The purpose of generating HDR images is to overcome the limited dynamic range of a camera’s imaging sensor. Suppose you are photographing a scene with both very dark objects and very bright objects: the dark objects will be close to the sensor’s noise level: if you attempt to reveal dark objects by brightening the image in (e.g.) Photoshop, the noise will be amplified too so the dark objects will drown in image noise. Similarly, bright objects may be brighter than the maximum brightness that can be recorded by the sensor and thus completely white (this is called ‘clipping’); darkening the photo will not reveal bright clipped objects anymore. To overcome this you take multiple photos of the same scene at different exposure levels. The HDR software (PTGui Pro) will take the ‘best’ pixels from all photos, i.e. those pixels that are not noisy and not clipped. It’s possible to do ‘pseudo HDR’ by extracting multiple exposures from a
Related Questions
- I’ve already been transferring my audio files back and forth between the HDR and Pro Tools. What added features would HDR Pro give me?
- Can’t I just take one image in RAW mode and use Adobe Camera RAW to generate my three or more bracketed images for HDR merge?
- Why can I extract gzipped raw data files downloaded with MSIE 6.x?
