HDR merge, can't get HDR blend planes? Option grey, unclickable.

[Dylanear]

I'm using 12.7 at work (Windows 10) and I'm stitching 35 images. 5 views, 7 bracketed exposures per view. Equirectangular spherical projection. I get perfect unified output, but I need  each view output too, but merged, matching the stitched whole in color. I have "Merge bracketed images to HDR and link the positions" selected. For output I have OpenEXR (but have tried others with no change), no LDR, HDR output set to "HDR panorama" and have "Individual HDR Layers" checked.

When I run the stitch this gives me 35 individual files in addition the main stitched image. None of the 35 extra images has exposure/color that matches the unified HDR stitched output or any of the individual input images. Bringing those images into Nuke to inspect and make sense of them, organizing them by group and adding all 7 in a group (merge node set to plus) and then multiplying them by 1/7th I get something pretty close, but not exactly the same color and brightness as the proper unified HDR image. It's hard for me to understand how these would be useful and I am inclined to think there's a bug and this just is not what is meant to happen. Maybe I just don't understand something.

There is another option, "HDR blend planes", but no matter what I set other things to, it stays grey and I can not select it.

I've used older versions of PTGui going back at least 16 year at other studios (mostly Linux) and it's always been trivial to output the unified image and an image of each view with proper merged HDR color/exposure perfectly matching the unified whole image.

I'd send you the PTGui file and the input/output images but that's not allowed due to confidentiality issues.

Please advise. Does this sound like expected proper behavior for the "Individual HDR layers" option? Under what conditions would the "HDR blend planes" be disabled besides when the project is not doing any HDR blends?

Thanks!

[Dylanear]

OK, I have a work around, but an annoying one. If I just select 1 image at a time from the Advanced "Include images:" list and manually change the file name each time and run the "stitch" once for each view/HDR group I get the results I need. But I would suspect this is what I'd get all at once IF I could select "HDR blend planes". If this isn't a bug, I am very bewildered by why it could be happening.

[PTGui Support]

Hi,

'Individual HDR layers' should be exposure matched to the 'HDR Panorama'
output.

There's one caveat: PTGui will make small adjustments in order to get a
smooth blend. To see if this is the issue, set Panorama Editor ->
Blending -> Blender to "Don't blend".

Blend Planes are disabled if the HDR workflow is set to Merge Bracketed
Images to HDR, then Blend. You can change this in the Exposure/HDR tab.

If you could post your project file (no images), I might be able to see
if anything's wrong.

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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[Dylanear]

"Blend Planes are disabled if the HDR workflow is set to Merge Bracketed
Images to HDR, then Blend. You can change this in the Exposure/HDR tab."

Why? Not sure I understand. Wouldn't you want a way to output the HDR merged views individually without having to deal with all the brackets? If the main output is an HDR image, you shouldn't have to manually output each camera view by hand to get an image per camera view that has the same color, HDR range and exposure as the main merged, stitched output.

What does disabling that do that's desirable, or what does removing that option prevent that is undesirable. It's been a while, I could be misremembering, but pretty darn sure In considerably older versions of PTGui, used at other studios in the past outputing each camera view in a separate image, but HDR merged matching the main output was trivial. Now I have to do that manually per camera view, changing the output file name each time by hand. Not the worst thing to have to deal with, but I don't see why a simple check box could do all that for me, as I'm pretty sure I've done in the past?

"If you could post your project file (no images), I might be able to see
if anything's wrong."

I think perhaps there's no bug, just questionable choice of disabling a feature in these circumstances for reasons I can't understand? Getting any kind of file out of the company filesystems takes a miracle, I don't expect it would be allowed unless there was a problem causing deadlines to be missed that had no work around. I hope you understand.

[Erik Krause]

Am 01.10.2021 um 20:54 schrieb Dylanear:
> "Blend Planes are disabled if the HDR workflow is set to Merge Bracketed
> Images to HDR, then Blend. You can change this in the Exposure/HDR tab."
>
> Why? Not sure I understand.

In the past PTGui used to do HDR only if all brackets where exposed with
the same pattern - each set consisting of the same exposures. That was
because PTGui used to first stitch all images with the same exposure to
a panorama (a blend plane), then blend the resulting panoramas. This
required fully manual exposure settings on the camera.

Since many users wanted to use automatic exposure PTGui 12 introduced
the possibility to first merge a set of bracketed images, then stitch.
Obviously there is no intermediate step with blend planes using this
workflow.

However, the old workflow is still available, if you use "Create blend
planes first, then merge to HDR".

--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de

[PTGui Support]

Individual HDR layers should be exposure matched to the HDR panorama,
regardless of this setting. The HDR layers are not merged though, if you
have bracketed source images, one layer per source image is generated,
not one layer per bracketed set.

All of this is entirely the same as in PTGui 11. The HDR workflow
setting is just an addition, in order to support Av bracketed panoramas.
Nothing was disabled or removed.

If you can't share your images, see if you can reproduce the issues you
are having with these images:

https://www.ptgui.com/images/tutorial5.zip

Kind regards,

Joost Nieuwenhuijse
www.ptgui.com

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