Photography

Editing

Last modified May 30, 2007 | Revision 16

Some useful photo editing software is:

By far the most popular photo editing software is Adobe Photoshop, and its consumer version Photoshop Elements.

After using Lightroom for a bit and using it to manage a few large shoots (including a 500 photo wedding) I feel pretty comfortable giving it my whole hearted endorsement. Even when I’m only dealing with a handful of images it’s really sweet because it allows me to see all my images quickly and start tweaking them straight away. You don’t have the full creative toolbox available in photoshop, but for most things (adjusting white balance, contrast, spot healing etc) lightroom is a much more streamlined workflow (King of workflows, Workflow of kings). Absolutely invaluable when you have stacks of images (especially if you shoot raw, like me) - david

Qtpfsgui

This appears to be a fairly recently developed piece of software that is rapidly growing in popularity at least on flickr. It supports several HDR formats, can create HDR images from LDR’s, and supports a wide range of tonemapping operators for HDR viewing. Having played with it a bit I’d say it’s as good and in somecases better than some of the commercial HDR programs I played around with (at least based on their demos). It has a rather strong community on flickr so check it out! The flickr group can be found here http://www.flickr.com/groups/qtpfsgui/. - eonsim

Autopano, Hugin & Panoramas

Hugin and Autopano-sift are a set of specialised applications designed for the production of photographic panoramas. A panorama can before from a collection of images that share a reasonable amount of overlap, about 10-25% overlap at each edge with the next image works fine. Also changing to manual mode on the camera and using the same settings for each photo is recommended.

Autopano if used to select the images you wish to compose the panorama, and then when run determines similar points between images to allow them to be blended togeather. Just make sure you tick “use full file paths” before running.

It generates an output.pto file which contains the control points.

Opening the file in hugin allows you to preview the panorama, and run a number of optimisation routines to improve the placement of the control points. It also allows manual placement of control points should you desire to alter or prevent any warp of the overall panorama. Once the control points are optimal recheck that the panorama looks fine with “Preview Panorama” (you may need to click Update) then use the centre and fit tools to fit the image properly.If you open the output file in hugin Then under the stitching options select: Calc Field of View Calc Optimal Size Choose NONA as Sticking engine Select Poly3 Multiply Tiff Compression LZW And “Save cropped images”

Clicking stitch will now calculate corrected versions of the original images and save them to disk.

Then open a console and navigate to the folder with the corrected images. Once there the application enblend (part of the hugin package) can be used to blend the images to form the final version of the panorama, this will also correct (to a certain degree) differences in lighting a image gamma. The command is:

enblend -m 320 -z -o RESULT.tif inputfiles*

The number after -m should be approximately 1/3rd of your ram if you have other apps running and wish to continue using your computer.

After enblend has processed the images to form the panorama you should edit it with photoshop, GIMP or your preferred image editor. Cropping, adjusting levels, and straightening are recommended.

For a more detailed tutorial I’d recommend Create a Panorama.

Feh. Real men hand-stitch ;-) —mattw Yes It’s quite obvious from the image, though I’d debate the men bit – eonsim

Last modified May 30, 2007 | Revision 16