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HF and CZM combo a winner

Posted: 29.03.2009 14:32
by BrianS
Dan and others,

I've been helping Nancy (peteschick) with her work with sea shells. Thought you might like to share something I've found.

It seems that her biggest single problem was (is) significant variations in exposure, I suspect due to (fixed !) lighting fluctuations (which I have yet to solve - very strange). These could range up to 1/3 or even 1/2 stop (similar to) even though camera settings had not changed.

The result was some horrendous halos around major edges, and softness in subtle areas.
So..., thought I'd try using CZM to pre process them just to balance brightness/ colour, and perform 2 pass auto alignment, output them as movie frames 100%, and then present them to HF. (used method A 4/4 as Method B was inferior in both instances)

Wow - check it out. What's going on here?

Dan I much prefer HF and am happy I purchased it, but are there any lessons here for improvements to HF?

For me this will be very useful for my difficult diamond shots.

Cheers

Update to last post

Posted: 30.03.2009 05:55
by BrianS
Dan,

Just noticed that in HF preferences-Auto adjust I had brightness set to 0%, which would not have hurt HF considering the exposure/brightness variations.

Changed this and redid the test, also using highest interpolation 16x16.

Whilst the result using the original images was much better, the result using the CZM brightness/alignment pre processed set was still clearly better.

Brian

Posted: 31.03.2009 14:10
by Dan Kozub
Brian,

Thanks for the tip. I will check how the latest version deals with brightness adjustment. Can you upload this stack to our server ? (http://heliconsoft.com/ftp.html)

Uploading now

Posted: 31.03.2009 15:07
by BrianS
Hi Dan,

have started uploading to a new Folder called NancysShells. Expect it to take a couple of hours - about 200meg

2 zip files loaded, with 35 jpgs in each (no great difference in using these compared to the tiffs, which would have taken for ever to upload)

File names describe their lineage DPP_####-LR jpgs were produced from tiffs from output from CR2's in Canons DPP, which had contrast (clarity) tweaked and a little sharpening done in Lightroom - then exported to 100% quality jpgs.

Improvedjpgs-CZM#####.jpgs, are these same jpgs above that were then passed through CZM, global brightness and auto align 2 pass only.

HF settings were the same for both sets, MA, R6, S4

Thanks

Brian

Posted: 04.04.2009 13:44
by fzf5bl
I have been having the same problem.Photoshop has not had this problem.