Lightning problems

[WideEyes]

Hello everybody.

I have only recently switched to a canon 5d and sigma 8mm. Since this upgrade (from coolpix 8700) I’ve strated making fullscreen panos, and the image quality have improved dramatically.

As a part of my workflow I shoot bracketed images and blending them with Photomatix whereafter I use PS for the final adjustments.

I have just looked at a few of my recent tours, and it seems that I am having problems with the luminance of the different scenes. The colors are satisfying (perhaps a bit too saturated) but I don’t like the fact that some scenes seem a lot darker then others. I would like to create greater consistency in the scenes, but I am not sure how to do this. So can anybody share your tips as to how you set the luminance?

I know that I can easily adjust the brightness in PS, but this doesn’t work for me. When I work on the individual scenes I tend to be quite happy with the result, but when building a tour and reviewing it after some time, I see the difference in the brightness, and it is very annoying.

I guess I want to know if there are any tools in PS to create consistency in the brightness, other then just looking at the scenes as this obviously doesn’t work for me?

Here is an example of what I mean. Go to http://www.wideeyes.dk/temp/kongensbro_kro/index.html The initial scene is great, but if you go to “vaelg billede” in the upper right corner and choose the second thumbnail from the left (vaerelse 9) you’ll see a big difference in the brightness.

I hope this is making sense and some of you more experienced PS guys can help me.

Best regards
Morten

[jaaaab]

Hi,

To me your lightning problem comes from your HDR processing, which destroys natural brightness.

Anyway, with ou without HDR processing, lightning is obviously different from one room to another when you shoot several panos in the same place.

So it is really for me a post-processing step using PS to keep all panos Homogeneous in terms of brightness/contrast and WB.

Cheers and good luck ;)

[dlgreene]

For white balance I use expodisc and I think it works pretty well... It's a little tricky to figure out what light source to shoot particularly when you have to deal with the sun from the windows and the flash indoors at the same time. I have to say I don't know if I'm any more successful than anyone else but it seems to work pretty well.

I have to agree with the previous post about HDR. I have yet to to find any improvement using it. In fact I find a real degradation.

Other than that I had a similar problem and I think I solved it with Silverfast HDR. HDR in Silverfast has nothing to do with HDR photos...

This listing is a little out of date. It is valid for this thread. It is a basic listing of my workflow.

http://www.dlgreene.com/workflow.aspx

By the way... Nice gui!

[WideEyes]

Hi

Thanks for replying guys. I really appreciate that :)

About the GUI. Thanks - but I can't take the credit. It was developed by the guys from Newspin360 (Kevin & Mike).

Best regards
Morten

[greenfin]

Thanks for sharing about GUI (Graphical user interface)

[purpleagent]

Hi WideEyes
I like your buttons and info box popping up from the bottom.
Can I ask how did you do this?