“Invalid Size” when using HDR created stacks

[Gameworden]

Hello I’m having a problem I hope you can help me with. I’m getting an “Invalid Size” error when I go to stack HDR created images from Photoshop.

The background:

My latest project was taking a photograph of an outdoor wooded scene. Because of the light I needed to create a 3-image HDR composite photograph image for every image layer stack I created.

So I needed a 2-stack, but for each stack I took 3-bracketed shots. I took the 3 bracketed shots and ran them through Photoshop’s HDR built in plug-in. Then I took the 2 HDR shots and tried stacking them in Helicon Focus. That’s when I get the “Invalid Size” error.

If I only choose one out of the 3-bracketed images (no HDR) then stack the two images in Helicon it works out fine.

Does Photoshop change the parameters of the final image, when it is created in HDR, in a way that Helicon can’t stack it? Is there a work around? Another program I should consider for creating HDRs and then will they work in Helicon? Suggestions?

Thank you in advance for any help you might have.

[Stas Yatsenko]

It looks like PS crops HDR results differently and Helicon Focus requires exactly same dimentions of the source images.

So I would recommend to crop results again or to merge in Focus first and do HDR merge later.

[jess81621]

I am having the same problem.

My question is, I thought to use Helicon Focus you have to export the RAW file to a location (like your desktop) as a TIFF, and then drag the TIFF into Helicon Focus.

So using that logic, I did all my edits to the raw files FIRST in Lightroom, INCLUDING merging files to create HDR images, and then editing them from there. The last step, or so I thought, would be to export these raw files as TIFFs and use Helicon Focus to stack the 3 remaining edited images (I had 3 images because I had selected 3 different focal points in the same shot).

What you're saying is you have to run the files through Helicon Focus FIRST - but that would mean I lose the ability to edit the raw file, wouldn't it? I want to edit the raw file, not a TIFF.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "crop the results again."

Please let me know if I'm missing something.

[Stas Yatsenko]

Helicon Focus requires images of the same dimensions. So if Lightroom or other HDR stacking engine produces result of different dimentions, they should be cropped uniformly. As to RAW handling: if you decide to focus stack first, you can save result images as DNG, which is almost the same as RAW file. See more details here: http://www.heliconsoft.com/raw-in-dng-out/