Preview window exposure confusion
Daniel Jensen
In the preview window, if photometrics is unchecked you can use the up or down buttons to adjust the exposure of the preview image, but this apparently has no effect on the output image. If photometrics is checked then even the effect on the preview window is eliminated, so apparently none of this does anything at all.
It's possible to type in a different number rather than just pressing up or down, but that number will be totally ignored, and if you press up or down it simply overwrites whatever you wrote in with 1/3 EV higher or lower than what used to be there.
This seems like a bit of a UI disaster. Is this really the way Hugin is supposed to be working? How am I supposed to set the output exposure?
Bruno Postle
On 16 Nov 2013 09:49, "Daniel Jensen" <dmje...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm doing some exposure fusing and am confused about how to set output exposure. I don't want the exposure to be the mean of the blended images' exposures- on average they're underexposed.
>
> In the preview window, if photometrics is unchecked you can use the up or down buttons to adjust the exposure of the preview image, but this apparently has no effect on the output image. If photometrics is checked then even the effect on the preview window is eliminated, so apparently none of this does anything at all.
What is happening is that the exposure fusion function applies the Hugin white balance and vignetting parameters to photos, but not exposure.
This is because all exposure fusion is doing is getting the 'best' bits from each photo and putting them together. If Hugin adjusted the exposure of all the photos in each bracketed stack then fusing wouldn't have anything to work with, since all the photos would look the same.
(You could argue that Hugin should ignore vignetting parameters too, since vignetting gets removed anyway by exposure fusion, but nobody has ever complained)
So the Eev settings are applied with normal unbracketed panoramas and to bracketed HDR output, but not to exposure fusion output. If the result is too dark you need to adjust afterwards in an image editor, beforehand in your RAW converter, or drop the darkest photo from each bracket.
Hope this makes sense, basically Hugin does everything in a photometrically correct space - Except exposure fusion which is just a clever visual trick and not photometrically meaningful at all.
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Bruno