Hi guys,

The Phoenix has been a very busy bee and has not been seen much on the pages for far to long. However I do show some work once in a while and thought I'd share a demo tour I'm creating for an amazing Hotel in Berlin. The challenge here was to capture the different ambinet lighting, dealing with sloping walls and various other issues best seen rather then explained. The mirror room was especially fun.

i took a screenshot of the site and fit everything in the given parametres which results in a fairly small viewer of 330ish to 225ish I think. The client has 2 more floors of rooms to take and a final template for the tour needs to be agreed upon. however we'll be doing a TW and QT fullscreen variant.

Your comments are apprecaitted.

Workflow:

• 3exposures brackted per 90 in RAW
• Raw shooter for pre production WB and colour correction work
• Shots taken into PS for layering work for HDR
• Layered shots stiched with PW4 at 6000x3000
• Coverted to cubic and back into PS for zenith/nadir repair
• Reconverted in PW4 and back to PS for final colour correction and minor repair work and then put through noise ninja to remove noise due to high iso required.
• Step down to 5000x2500 and unsharp mask at 50 for full screen
• For the 1600x800 i steped dwn from the original to5000x2500,4000x2000,3000x1500 and finally to 1600x800 useing unsharpmask at 30% on the way.
• Tour made in TW and QT useing PW4 (however final QT tour will use other software) 

Canon 30D, Sigma 8mm, Manfrotto RC141 tripod + leveler, Agnos Rotator M, Extreme 3 4GB Flash card, RAW Shooter, PS CS + Noise Ninja, TW and PW.

Phoenix:

Great work at the hotel especially the mirror room.  If you don't mind, could you explain in more detail the layering work for HDR.  This is the next step that I am trying to take with my business having just purchased the Sigma 8mm for better quality panos.  Also, were you bracketing 1 or 2 stops or did it depend on the scene?

Thanks
TTurner

Hi there tt,

RAW has been an amazing addition to my workflow. RAW is the key for good work as you can easily compensate for all kinds of lighting problems. It also means that I don't need to worry about white balance settings and only need 3 shots brackted. I use 1 stop eitherside of my middle image. My old CP4500 setup required 5-6 shots per direction and I had loads of WB issues especially in challenging conditions.

I tend to set up my 30D Sig 8mm at f11-f13 (I was told this is the optimum for this lens and it seems to work). I then just turn the cam in different directions and tend to use the 9 point focus, give a little squeeze to test for lighting conditions, find a middle range I'm happy with and then take my 3 brackted shots per 90 useing the timer. This ensures no camera shake and ensures perfect alignment of the 3 images in post processing.

HDR... well no big secret there. Some use programms to layer the images over each other. This is something you can use with a panotools setup as u map one set of images, stich the pano and use the same settings for the other bracketed shots giving you 3 panos perfectly aligned to throw into the HDR software. However you can't do this with PW 4.

I tend to revert to PS blending technics which is just down to experience and having spent far to many hours learning how to blend images well. So having taken my RAW images into my RAW prog I find a WB point I like and use the same settings for all of my exposures eg: colour tep 2400, tint - 6 etc. I convert the images to tiffs and will always load my middle exposure image first. I'll then  pull in my slightly overexposed or underexposed image next, copy my middle image and paste onto the under/over. Using the erasure tool and a brush with soft edges I'll blend in the underlieing image, the soft edges of the brush ensure a lesser erausre to the edges giving a more gradual removal towards the outside of the parts I'm removing. This results in a soft blend from one exposure to the other. At times, especially for ceilings near windows or window frames or near lamps, I'll reduce the amount I'm removing to 50% or 20% etc to ensure no harsh light differnces between images. When i'm happy Ihit control e which makes the layers become one and load the other image for either the highlight or low light work and follow the same procedure. repeat with all images and then stich.

the trick is to remember what blending you#ve done where and erase the same amount between layers for each of the 90 or you'll hae clolour/light issues between images when stiching. 

It used to take me many hours to get this right. Now i seldom need more the 5 minutes for each 90 and another 5 mins for clean up work. However it still means that I'll take 40 minutes for each image when challenging but often less then 20.

Hope this helps

Phoenix:

Thank you for your very in-depth explanation of your blending technique.  I will give this a try and see what I can come up with.  A few days ago I was trying this method somewhat with two images but not with the skill you have.  Perhaps my methods were too aggressive and I should proceed more slowly.

Thanks Again...
TTurner