HDR/ Photo stacking software Help Please!

sowen6

sowen6

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83
Name
Simon
Edit My Images
Yes
I have had a look at a lot of threads on here that relate to HDR and stacking photos, they all talk about doing this in Photoshop but I have opted for PS Elements 6 for 2 reasons:-

1 Cost!! There is no way I could justify the cost of CS3 or what ever the latest full version of Photoshop is now

2 Ability :thinking: !! I don’t know how Elements works yet so there is very little point in getting the full version!!

Any way to my question
Can I stack several long exposure night time photos using Elements 6?

I love (for some reason) taking night time shots and am slowly getting closer to the correct settings for different night conditions but had been looking at aligning and stacking 3 or 4 short (15-20 sec) exposures to bring out the sharp stars. Do I have to use Raw etc to enable the options to stack / HDR the pictures?

Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks all
 
I don't believe Elements has a specific merge feature which allows you to bring together and tone map multiple image files. Have you thought about looking at something like Photomatix Pro (specifically for creating HDR and considerably cheaper, with a trial version available) or Artizen (which I think may even be free)?

In response to your question regarding whether you have to use RAW then the literal answer is no, you can use TIFF or even JPG's but you would be better off using the RAW files themselves if you can.

In the night scene you mentioned the stars will likely not be the challenge. It will be the shadow detail. I would try some HDR in normal light, indoors, or even twilight to get a feel for it first. I'm no expert on HDR either, but the two rules of thumb I would suggest are to make sure you capture the entire dynamic range (check all the histograms to make sure you get all highlights and all shadow detail) and change only the shutter speed for each exposure (you probably don't want varying d.o.f across the images)
 
Great, I had spotted this on a few of the links but only after reading a few more threads does is seem logical. Anyway I guess the real answer is
PS Elements (6) does not really alow HDR stylle Photo merge (stack) and alignment tools. Therefore I shall be trying 'Picturenaut' as a free download and see if this helps me out. Has anyone had any experiance with this or other free HDR software that they would recomend??
Thanks to Tom and LJR :)
 
sowen6 said:
Great, I had spotted this on a few of the links but only after reading a few more threads does is seem logical. Anyway I guess the real answer is
PS Elements (6) does not really alow HDR stylle Photo merge (stack) and alignment tools. Therefore I shall be trying 'Picturenaut' as a free download and see if this helps me out. Has anyone had any experiance with this or other free HDR software that they would recomend??
Thanks to Tom and LJR :)
Click to expand...

No worries, I'd go with photomatix though to be honest. It's not just the combining and alignment that's the main issue, it's the tonemapping features and facilities too. Good thing about photomatix is you have the tutorial from Pete at Vanilla days to use for reference (y)
 
Yeah I admit to owning Photomatix too. It's a great little tool and the tone mapping features are very useful.
 
I used CombineZP (I think it is now) to try out focus stacking. I was really impressed with what it could do (and how easy it was to use). Very cool tool indeed.
 
Ok so last night I went on a bit of a mission!! I down loaded the following:

Photomatix pro 3.1.2
registax
Deep Sky Stacker
IRIS
Startrails

It may seem like a lot of extra software just to see if I can get a good night time shot but as I said in the opening part of this thread I dont really know what I am doing so I am going to try each software and see which one gives me the best result!

I will however keep Photomatrix Pro anyway as I am really quite keen on trying a few HDR shots soon but as I head to the Northan depths of Sweden tomorrow for a few weeks I shall be having a go at Star scapes first!

Has anyone had any problems / experiance with the softwares above that may halp me out?? Any key things to avoid doing etc??
Thanks all
:)
 
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