One strange failure with SNS-HDR.

[Redcrown]

I'm an old, long time user of SNS, and I've made thousands of SNS-HDR images. Mostly landscapes, shot handheld in bright daylight. I'm steady enough and SNS is good enough at alignment that I've never had a handheld problem. But recently I encountered a set of images that SNS simply could not align. The results were very bad.

I think there is something unique about this scene that confuses SNS. I've even pre-aligned the images in Photoshop and fed them to SNS, yet it still fails if I leave Align on. But if I turn those off, SNS has no problem with the pre-aligned images. I get a good merge.

Here are links to the 3 images, plus a sample of the bad aligned result I get, if someone wants to play around.

These are from a recent trip where I made hundreds of bracketed shots, many with similar exposure and haze. Yet only this one set failed to align.

https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-2Cn ... dmf-X4.jpg
https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-H9d ... 52R-X4.jpg
https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-GQP ... dzq-X4.jpg

And my merged result:

https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-Cwq ... rwx-X4.jpg

[Sebastian Nibisz]

https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-2Cn ... dmf-X4.jpg

I see that the above image is not aligned correctly. The other images are aligned correctly: pimages/i-H9dX52R-X4-HDR.jpg
I'll look at the alignment algorithm.

[Redcrown]

Thanks Sebastian, but remember this is only one of thousands. I think there is something very unique about the images that confuses the alignment algo. The hazy mountain in the far distance may be the cause. I doubt it is worth your effort.

[OpenTours]

We edit over a thousand real estate photos a week and some of them we do handheld. Even with an image stabilizing lens and shooting extremely fast, there are about 1 in 50 photos that it struggles with the alignment. Photomatix handles these fine so although I'd prefer the output from SNS. There are also a few that neither can handle the alignment properly and we just reduce the number of exposures or manually blend in photoshop using their layer alignment.

Here's the output and 5 brackets used if you'd like to use them for calibration purposes.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing