SNS-HDR Forum

I love SNS-HDR and use the "Home" version to create tone-mapped images of image triplets that are later stitched into 360 x 180 degree panoramas.

However, I do still find that ghosts are sometimes left in my images, and these are very difficult to eliminate. My first question is, can the mask function be used to tell SNS-HDR which of two or three overlapping images (usually of people moving around) should be used in the final tone-mapped image? I can't make that work, as the mask selection tool doesn't seem to recognise the details of people images, although it's extremely good at recognising similar textures and tonalities. Would appreciate any suggestions that might help to avoid wasting my time.

I have also been finding that SNS-HDR is not removing CA and purple fringes as well as the latest version of Adobe ACR (I have version 6.7 in PS CS5). I have therefore been using the synch. function in ACR to remove CA and fringes and then to write TIFFs that I feed to SHS-HDR. My second question is, is there any way for me to improve the way SNS-HDR removes CA and fringes? And am I creating any problems for SNS-HDR in processing time or functionality, etc., by feeding it TIFFs rather than the original DNG files?

Roger

Better function of removing ghosts and CA reduction function will be added in the future release. Will be able to manually specify the base area to remove ghosts.

Thanks, Sebastian. Are we talking weeks or months of waiting? These will be really valuable upgrades if they work as well as the rest of your splendid program!

And while I have your ear, are there any disadvantages to batching in ACR and using TIFFs in SNS-HDR?

Roger wrote:Thanks, Sebastian. Are we talking weeks or months of waiting? These will be really valuable upgrades if they work as well as the rest of your splendid program!

These features will be available in version 2.0. You have to wait about two months. Upgrading to version 2.0 will be free.

Roger wrote:And while I have your ear, are there any disadvantages to batching in ACR and using TIFFs in SNS-HDR?

You can convert images to TIFF 16-bit in ACR.

Oh good! Great news... And thanks for the fast reply!

I know I can convert images to 16-bit TIFFs in ACR--because I've been doing it already. What I want to know is whether there are any disadvantages. I mean, apart from the extra time taken (no big deal) and all the extra space taken by those big TIFF files... Is SNS-HDR equally happy with DNG or TIFF files?

There is no significant difference for multiple exposures. Dng format is better for single exposures.

Thanks! That's EXACTLY the kind of thing I wanted to know!

Roger

Sebastian Nibisz wrote:Better function of removing ghosts and CA reduction function will be added in the future release. Will be able to manually specify the base area to remove ghosts.

In my opinion CA removal is not as important as deghosting. CA removal is better done in the raw converter and f.e. recent ACR does this brilliantly, without user interaction and for all lenses.

Photomatix does a very good deghosting but no matter how I adjust the parameters the results are by far worse mainly in sharpness and color rendition than even SNS-HDR lite results straight out of the box. SNS-HDR would be the premier HDR tool in all respects if it's deghosting would match that of Photomatix. I'm waiting impatiently for version 2 and in fact have postponed the processing of some panoramas until a better deghosting will be available in SNS-HDR...