I just added another two 21:9 wallpapers to my wallpapers section of this blog. Just head over there to get them now :)

One of the ways you can create panoramic photos is also Autopano from Kolor. And today, I will show you how to use it, if you want to create HDR panoramas.

There are two approaches to creating a HDR panorama. Either you first create HDR’s from each series of photos, and then combine the results into a panorama, or your first create a panorama for each exposures of same brightens, and then use those to create the HDR. The second way is much more preferred, as it will avoid unwanted color mismatches. The only exception is 360 degree panoramas, as some tonemapping software does not support repeating edges, and you have to use the opposite approach.

There is also a third option, where you create the HDR result directly in Autopano. It makes things easier, but I personally prefer a result directly from a program specialized for tonemapping. I just  find them better. So In this guide I will show you how to do that. So let’s get started.

Btw. all the screenshots are from Autopano Giga 4 beta 5. and you can find more about it on the Kolor official page.

1. Let’s start in Lightroom. It’s always better to prepare the exposures first, remove chromatic aberrations, remove lens distortion and vignetting and then export the files as 16-bit tiff files. If you have a slow computer and a big panorama, better to go with a jpg, as it’s very computer intensive.
2. Next we need to open the files in Autopano. First create a new group, with the New group button in the bottom left. Now add all the exported files to it, with the Add image in top left of the group window.

1. all source files

2. open files in Autopano

3. This will load all the exposures, and Autopano will detect that this is a HDR. The problem is that they are not split into stacks, so if you just continued like this, you can only save a final HDR, not the layers for separate exposures. And we need that. So don’t select any photos in the group. If you clicked on one, just click on the background and deselect it. Now right click on the background of the group and choose Create stacks by N;
4. You will get a new popup, where you have to choose how many exposures you took for every photo (each series has to be the same) and which one is the main. The main picture is the one we will use for the blending of the panorama, and it will be shown as the preview. So choose the number of exposures, and the main picture somewhere in the middle, around the 0EV exposure. Here the number of exposures per shot were 5 and the middle one was the 3rd one. Confirm with OK.

3. choose create stacks

4. create stacks

5. We are back in the main window now, and we need to tweak the detection settings. Click on the wrench icon in the top left, and in the new popup, let’s look at the Links part. The first settings determines where Autopano looks for control points. Since we set up a main layer for every stack, setting this to The reference level, will use that to detect the control points (it’s actually also the default value). Secondly, if we turn on Use hard links, Autopano will presume that the shots were taken on a tripod, and will do the aligning only one, and than just copy the same settings onto all other exposures. This will result in all panoramas to be the same on export. Click ok to continue, and then on Detect in the top left.
6. The detection will take a while, especially with many photos, and once it done, you will get a new panorama on the right. Click the edit button, to edit the settings of that panorama.

5. change detect settings

6. edit panorama

7. The edit window will open. I will not go to too much detail here, as this tutorial focuses on the HDR aspect, but I will show you few things we need to correct.
8. We need to choose the right projection settings. CLick on Projection settings button and choose the one that fits best to the photo you are editing. For me it’s spherical for this one.

7. editor

8. select projection

9. Another thing I want to turn off is the color correction. This is because I want Autopano do no edits to the images, as I want to use them further in different software. Click on Edit color anchor and choose none. When this is done (and you need no other corrections) close the edit window.
10. The next step is to render the layers. Click on the gear icon and in the render dialog choose: Anti-ghost as the blending present, 16-bit tiff as the file format and layers as the exported data. You can also turn on Remove alpha channel, as we don’t need it. Hit Render to continue.

9. remove corrections

10. choose render settings

11. This will now take a while, but after the waiting, you will get a panorama series, that you can use further in a HDR tone-mapping program. You can save you panorama settings in Autopano, but I usually don’t, as I don’t plan to redo it.
12. From here you just continue as with any other HDR. You can for instance create the HDR in Oloneo Photoengine.

11. render

12. merge HDR

And thats all the steps you need to combine the panoramas for HDR in Autopano. Feel free to ask any questions and also check out my other article on combing photos for HDR panoramas.

Some time ago, I written about how I manually focus my photos, and today I will show you a different way to get the best DOF using the Hyperfocal distance.

What is Hyperfocal distance

In simplest terms, Hyperfocal distance is a distance on which you have to focus your lens, to get the maximum amount of DOF. To say it differently, it’s the closes distance on which you can focus, while still archive a good sharpness for objects at infinity.

The Hyperfocal distance is of course not the same for all situations, as it is dependent in the sensor size, aperture used and focal length. Each time one of these changes, the Hyperfocal distance becomes different.

Additionaly, there is one more parameter, the Circle of confusion. This one is only dependent on the sensor and can be found specifically for every camera. The circle of confusion, is the size a point in the scene can make on your sensor, for it still to appear sharp. The more out of focus it its, the bigger it appears on the sensor. You may know that as bokeh. In some calculators of Hyperfocal distance you can change this value, in some it uses one base on the sensor size. It’s always best to check the one that is exact for you camera.

How to calculate the Hyperfocal distance

You can get yourself the equations an calculate it yourself, but the simplest way is to just print yourself a table with the values (which you can find easily on the internet) or even better use a Hyperfocal calculator app. Here is an example of a table, I made for my camera 5D mark II, simply using the Hyperfocal Pro app for Android.

You can see here the different distances for combinations of aperture and focal length.

How to use the Hyperfocal distance

So what now when you know the distance? You turn of auto-focus on your lens, and focus on that distance. You sometimes need to do this just approximately, as the distance scale on a lens is not so detailed. Now you will get everything from half that distance to infinity into focus. I would suggest doing the composition first and having the camera on a tripod, as without that it’s hard to maintain that distance. Also each time you change the aperture or the focal length, you have to recalculate and refocus.

When to use it

It’s great when you need to have an exact idea about the DOF to get the maximum sharpness. Especially if you are trying to take a photo that includes a foreground element and should be sharp into infinity. In all the other cases, it should be sufficient to focus one third into the scene to get a good result.

For todays process post, I decided to show you a photo that is not a HDR, but where I was forced to use focus blending, and I had to deal with not enough shots taken. So let’s get started.

This is a view of the SNP bridge in Bratislava, as seen from the Bratislava castle.

Finished photo

Original photo

I took two series for this, just to be sure, one focused on the bars, one on the bridge in the background. When looking at them in Lightroom, I found out that I need just one from booth, and one brighter fore few tweaks, so I just cropped the image, corrected the horizon, white balance and opened the two images in Photoshop.

All exposures

Used exposures corrected in Lightroom

I don’t know what I was thinking while taking this shot, as of course just focusing twice here is not enough. The problem is, hat if you try to blend two shots like this, the foreground element will get bigger when its out of focus, and that will not allow for a nice blend. You can see it in the first screen-shot from Photoshop here. The blend produces an ugly soft border around everything. So I needed to do something more, and this is what I did.

1. The shot focused on the background
2. Copy of layer 1, as I needed to experiment with edits, and I didn’t want to open the layer over and over again (I will explain the edits in a moment :))
3. The shot focused on the foreground. Using layers, I painted out all the content one can see through the bars
4+5. Here I used the brighter exposure, to brighten the bars, and then used a second layer mask on the group, so the effect is not inside the bars
6. Color efex Pro contrast, to get more local contrast and detail in the photo.
7. Color efex Tonal contrast on the borders and the background, as it still was very low contrast, due to it snowing at that moment.
8. A little overall contrast using curves.

Blending problem

All edits in Photoshop

Now this take care of all the detail and contrast, but there is still the problem with the bad blending. So what I did, on the second layer, I selected one by one the openings in the bars and made the image inside bigger. Like this the border disappeared behind the bars, and I got a nice blend. I had to be careful so the bridge and the road line up after the resize.

Here you can see the second and third layers, to better show this.

Second layer after resizing

Third layer after masking

Btw. if I did this correctly, I would take more shots, with different focus, or I would use a smaller aperture.

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

I know you all want a post about the blue/black dress (or white/gold?) today, but no, not from me :)

Today’s post is about a question I got few days ago. A question if I knew about any free Photoshop alternative. This is quite an interesting question, and to tell the truth, I knew about none that was really suitable. I’ve been using Photoshop for the last 15 years, and I never thought about looking for something else. So I started searching. For me a Photoshop alternative would have to be a local program that works solidly with layers. I’m not a big fan of online editors that work in a browser, as the stability of browsers is horrible as it is, and I don’t trust them with my work.

Gimp

Over and over again I seen Gimp to be suggested as the best alternative. There are two alternative there, the Gimp and Gimpshop, which is a version that tries to emulate Photoshop more, with more Photoshop like interface. So I decided to give it a try. First I went for the Gimpshop, as that would probably be easier. My experiment ended already by the installer, when it tried to install some strange additional software onto my system and the installation dialog didn’t even had any cancel button. Sorry, that’s not what I want to have on my PC. So I switched to the normal Gimp, at least there I got only what I wanted.

I actually tried Gimp some 10 years ago, and first look at the latest version, it looked exactly as before. So I tried to go and edit a photo. The first big problem was that Gimp does not support 16-bit files (I found an announcement from 2012 that this should be implemented, but not in the current version). Thats already a deal breaker for me, but I thought I try and blend an image. The layers work fine, so the basic blending is possible. While trying to do luminance masking I was not so successful. First I could not find the RGB channel, so I could only work on R, G or B and then the intersection of selection worked strangely, so I could not create more specific selection.

And there where my experiments with Gimp stopped. It is just so far away from my workflow, that I can’t use it. Maybe I just missed something, but the UI just didn’t fit my style.

But if I should suggest you a free Photoshop alternative, this is still the best one you can get. You can use layers, you can do basic blending, you can do image edits. But if you want to edit photos every day, I would still go with Photoshop. Even just the support from third party plug-ins is worth the investments.

Affinity photo

There is also a new alternative, that is currently in beta. It’s called Affinity photo, and it looks very modern and capable. For me the problem here is that it’s mac only, so I have no way to try it out. But I think you should give it a try :)

Photoshop alternative?

So to tell the truth, I could not find a free alternative to Photoshop that I could suggest. Maybe some of you have some tips? If yes, feel free to share.