Thursday, November 19, 2009
HDR Utilities
Shooting HDRI's
- full HD resolution 1920 x1080
- 24 and 30 fps, possibly up to 60 fps
- saves to fiber coupled storage server
- records 5 hours of EXR frame sequences
The Civetta is built on Canon technology, and snaps fullframe pictures with a 15mm fisheye. That makes it more of a traditional panobot, with all the speed and resolution advantages. If you had the patience and real skills in lathing and milling, you could build such a panobot yourself. Except, it wouldn't look as slick, and it wouldn't be as easy to use.
Light Probe Images
CHROME BALL METHOD
Easy learning curve
Glass balls are $10 to $25 each or steel balls
Easier to process and convert to HDR files because it is just a single file
Overall low quality* image (*This can be improved if you shoot 2 or 3 additional angles of the same ball)
Overall, captures accurate color/light information
Not ideal for background plates or reflection maps (unless they will be very out of focus or blurred on purpose)
LATITUDE-LONGITUDE PANORAMIC METHOD
Can be stitched in Photoshop.
Multi-image spherical panoramic HDR
10 spherical panoramas. Each panorama was taken one f-stop of exposure apart in order to capture the full range of light in this scene.
Equipment: digital camera, tripod, panoramic photography pan and tilt head, shutter release cable, Stitching application, HDR Shop.
- Photographing the panorama, bracketing each shot
- Parsing the files by exposure and renaming them
- Stitching one exposure into a panorama then using the same stitching project to render each exposure
- Creating a responce curve for the camera
- Creating, editing and setting the whitebalance for the HDRI
- Conclusion
Multi-image spherical panoramic HDR
Gear is much more expensive and heavy
Exponentially more files are needed, which means more hard drive space, more file management, more retouching, etc….
Bigger time/manpower investment
High quality results can be used for lighting, reflection maps, and background plates.
(Side note – You generally only need a very low resolution panoramic HDR file for the actual lighting information. You might need a higher or full res version for the reflections or background plates)
Much more "flexible" in that you have a high quality image that you can always make smaller if needed.
History
What is HDRI?
a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image.
· This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to represent more accurately the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.
What is it used for?
computer renderings and photography
HISTORY
1850
The idea of using several exposures to fix a too-extreme range of luminance was pioneered as early as the 1850s by Gustave Le Gray
1930
High dynamic range imaging was originally developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff's detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1940s. Wyckoff implemented local neighborhood tone remapping to combine differently exposed film layers into one single image of greater dynamic range.
1980
First practical application of HDRI was by the movie industry in late 1980s and, in 1985, Gregory Ward created the Radiance RGBE image file format which was the first (and still the most commonly used) HDR imaging file format.
1993
Global HDR was first introduced by Steve Mann: different approach, based on making a high-dynamic range luminance or light map using only global image operations (across the entire image), and then tone mapping this result.
1997
Global-HDR technique of combining several differently exposed images to produce a single HDR image was presented to the computer graphics community by Paul Debevec
2005
Photoshop CS2 introduced the Merge to HDR function
Thursday, September 10, 2009
HDRI Outline
I. Introduction
-High Dynamic Range Imaging
- A method to digitally capture and edit all light in a scene.
- For photographers, panoramas, and 3d scenes.
II. Background
A. What is HDRI?
B. History
- HDRI started in the film industry
- For photographers:
Places digital ahead of analog.
Bypasses the analog problem of over and under exposure.
- Leap in imaging technology as revolutionary as leap from B&W to color.
III. How it works
A. Capturing HDRIs
B. Generating HDRIs
-Picturenaut
C. Tone Mapping
C. Retouching
IV. Creative Applications
A. HDRI Photography
B. Panoramic HDRI photography
C. HDRI 3D Rendering
V. Conclusion