SNS-HDR Forum

I have just been evaluating the trial copy of SNS-HDR Pro and I am impressed. There is however one reservation. The Tonemapping process seems to have introduced quite a lot of structured noise to the finished images. No amount of noise reduction either in Photoshop or using Imagenomic Noiseware Pro has any effect on this. It seems to be immune to noise reduction. I therefore wondered if this noise was a deliberate feature of the trial software or whether this would also feature in the fully licensed version. I would be most grateful if anybody could advise me on this.

SNS-HDR generates little noise. You show the crop of the HDR image and crop of the brightest source image. Do you disabled the deghosting option?

Sebastian, thankyou for your quick reply. I have attached thumbnail crops of my test images as you request. I should explain that my three test images were made from one RAW file by altering the exposure to show Shadows, Mid tones and highlights properly exposed. The "Original" thumbnail is taken from the lightest of these as you suggest. The other two thumbnails show the post process crop with and without deghosting. The thumbnails are of a mid tone area taken from fullsize TIFFs. I was wrong about noise reduction having no effect. It does make a difference.

Thanks for the sample images.
Large noise exists in the source image. You must reduce this noise before processing image in the SNS-HDR.

Thanks Sebastian. I will try that. Are you interested in the result?

John 2 wrote: Are you interested in the result?

Yes.

Problem solved Sebastian. Thanks for your help. The noise structure is slightly more soft in the HDR image but no worse(de-ghosting turned off). See below:

Sebastian,

I see that dcraw.exe has a noise removal command line action.

Is there any chance it could be incorporated into SNS-HDR Pro at any time?

If not then is there a work around to use it on noisy RAW files. At the moment I am using Lightroom to remove the noise but the snag with that is LR converts the file from its RAW format and I then have to run two separate batches into Pro.

Tony

Tony,

I can see where you're coming from.
For what it's worth I've found it best to convert from RAW to TIFF in the program that does it best (and noise is a major element in this), use SNS-HDR for what it does best, and that then further edit in a specialist editing program.
In my case Sillkypix for RAW conversion (does some lens correction automatically), and Picture Window Pro for editing.

Mike.

Thanks Mike,

Often that is what I do. I convert RAW to Tiff with Lightroom and single out any shots that look as though they could be helped with HDR.

The time I really like to batch is with my bracketed triples as LR can do little of value with them and let SNS-HDR work with the RAWs.

Having said that I wonder how much quicker SNS-HDR is when it has not to convert from RAW? I must do a comparitive timing as it may be quicker to use LR to convert the bracket shots to something like tiff and then let the HDR loose on them.

Tony