360 pano, auto expose?

[Paul Womack]

In an outdoor panorama, when making a 360 pano, it is "obvious" that the exposures are going to vary a lot as you rotate with respect to the sun. Since my widest lens is 28mm, I need to take a lot of shots.

The "by the book" solution to this would be to have a fixed exposure, and exposure bracket each shot widely.

Hugin has facilities to handle such a (Large!!) set of images.

But each individual shot is likely NOT to have a HDR. The HDR is a property of the multiple shots.

It is rather easy to gather a set of good quality, well exposed shots in such a situation by simply taking each shot using automatic exposure (with a fixed aperture, but variable shutter speed).

But does Hugin have a good approach to handling such a set of images? And (if so) what is it?

[J. Schneider*]

Hello Paul,
I don't know if this is the intended use, but my experience is: Using
default settings works pretty well quite often.
Panorama output: Exposure corrected, LDR
Processing: Remapper: nona, Blender: enblend

If the exposure correction leads to darker images getting too dark or
brighter images getting too bright (depending on the anchor image)
because of hugin's approach of adjusting all images to the anchor image
- then I first try choosing a different anchor image.
If this doesn't help (e.g. choosing a medium exposed image and then both
ends of the brightness scale are too bright/dark), then I use exposure
fusion:
Panorama output: Exposure fused from any arrangement.

Both methods depend on sufficient overlap. For Exposure fusion it is of
course much more important to have well fitting images and no moving
objects because such defects can't be made up for by a well placed seam.

Best regards
Joachim

[dkloi]

Autoexposure works fine with a little bit of care. It's how I take all of my panorama. Shoot raw. Take brackets if the intra-frame contrast is too high to capture in a single exposure. Develop the raw files, cranking highlight recovery to max if needed, plus shadow boost. Assemble 16 bit tiffs as normal in Hugin. If there are large exposure differences in the entire scene, I'll export the whole pano with different exposures and enfuse them together, then adjust to taste. It's a bit more involved when incorporated brackets, masking in highlight/shadow detail for the under/overexposed exports. 

I wrote a blog post https://www.dkloi.co.uk/?p=1501 on the technique using Hugin with example files.