Amazingly natural looking new exposure blending method

Hi Folks,

I've come across an innovation that I'd like to share; Enfuse. It's currently in a beta stage of development, and a precomplied command line version is available for MS Windows, Mac users need to compile themselves. This pre-release version has some known issues, but I've been able to use it for evaluation with a maximum of 5 large images.

It is not an HDR application in the true sense, but it's an exposure blending application. It requires a number of (aligned) images with different exposure times as input, to span a larger dynamic range than can be captured in a single shot. The method used can also be applied to focus-stacking, which have yet to try out. The resulting exposure blended images look stunning, and more importantly they look very natural.

It also looks very good as a tool to extract the maximum image quality from a Raw file that is processed in e.g. 3 versions, one for the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. The perfect alignment between the images is a given in such a scenario, and 'Enfuse' will take care of the per pixel blending, without the explicit need for blending masks.

Bart

Any sample pics to share?

I looked at the link, found the download for windows here: http://enblend.sourceforge.net/

You say this is an innovation? Are there no other products that do this? Or does Enfuse just do it better or offer options that no other product offer? Or just that this is free?

I have heard of enfuse.

I believe this was done with that software - http://dativ.at/fotos/panoramas/adr/adr.html

Edward Bussa said:

Any sample pics to share?

I looked at the link, found the download for windows here: http://enblend.sourceforge.net/

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Yes, I'll prepare some, but it's best to try it on some of your most problematic images to really appreciate the output quality. I know how hard some of my images are to get right, even when converting them to HDRs first, but they are no problem for Enfuse.

You say this is an innovation?

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Yes, I've been researching the subject of (natural light) high contrast scenes for many years. This is a very significant improvement in producing a credible output solution, even on some of the classical HDR problem files when Enfuse is fed with the original files that were used to create the HDR composite.

Are there no other products that do this?

Click to expand...

Of the ones I've seen, this ranks at the top, but at a fraction of the hassle to get there.

Or does Enfuse just do it better or offer options that no other product offer? Or just that this is free?

Click to expand...

Seeing is believing, it being free is a bonus.

Bart

Here's a quick available light example, before (single exposure) and after (fully automatic blend of 5 exposures):


The 'enfusion' provides a much better basis for further postprocessing of tonality. This is a single tile from a full multirow panorama which I'm going to reprocess. The details are so much richer, one should see the differences at full size to really appreciate the improvement in structural detail and color.

Bart

And here is another example of a tuned classic example from the inventors of one of the most effective HDR tonemapping methods, pitted against Enfuse (all options on default):


Mind you, these are extreme examples of known problem sequences. On less extreme scenes the results look better, and will require less tweaking.

Bart

Bart,
Do we now need a method for being able to return back geometrically correct shadows where we wish to add the final impression of being in a world with sunlight?

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

Bart,
Do we now need a method for being able to return back geometrically correct shadows where we wish to add the final impression of being in a world with sunlight?

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Asher, I'm not sure I understand your question, but there are 2 possibilities when using Enfuse. First, one can use several optimized images, e.g. for noise, shadows, mid-tones, and highlights (e.g. from a single Raw file, or separate aligned exposures). Second, Enfuse allows to tweak its 'fusing' algorithm with some optional parameters. The current parameters allow to balance between contrast, saturation, and average exposure.

Finally, when we're presented with a better image as starting point, an image that better represents the perceptual tonal range of the original scene, we can additionally use tools like Shadows/Highlight to adjust local brightness and overall contrast.

Bart

I was scared that Enfuse migfht abolish delicate shadows if they vanished early as the light levels were raised.

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

I was scared that Enfuse migfht abolish delicate shadows if they vanished early as the light levels were raised.

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I think it depends on the image at hand. Maybe we'd have to try it with a particular image pair (double Raw conversion, high and low tonal range emphasis), and see what the effect of e.g. reducing the contrast or exposure weight does to the result. This is a new tool (currently in beta), so we need to learn how to exploit it best.

What I've seen sofar in my personal tests is a result that doesn't look over-the-top like some HDR renditions, even with the most challenging images. That means that blends of the different images are handled in a perceptually convincing fashion. How and what we blend is still the choice of the user.

Bart

It looks very promising. One of my issues with HDR images is that they always tend to look unnatural and flat to me. It's nice to see that folks are getting over seeing how far they can push the technology and getting back to the primary purpose, which in my opinion is pretty pictures not hyper detail. I like that Efuse let some of the highlights blow out a little bit in the Belgium house image. It keeps some of the natural feel of the light without really sacrificing anything I think.

-Colleen

I agree with Colleen,

A whole lot of the HDR images that I have seen in the past were cooked well beyond normal and brought into a whole new class of imagery that doesn't look natural in my opinion. So I'm also happy to hear about a new tool that shows the promise of providing a trouble free way to extend the DR of a image in a convincing way. But I've got to be honest, I'd still prefer a camera that can record these images in one shot.

Eric

HDR is/was possible whithout that HDR-look as well; but quite a lot of photographers like just that °outrageous° effect...

This is a HDR-shot, without beeing washed-out:



The °enfused° church image looks - at the walls - quite a bit unnaturally, too.
I agree, it's not romanesque; my eyes though never ever did see a church of this type with such a regular light; losing all the light/twilight/shadows °aura° of the sacred place.

There's a front-end-Gui for Enfuse avaliable for Macs now: Bracketeer

off course from a pano guy, as they need this stuff more than °normal° photographers

I'm a little lost...is there a website from the company selling Enfuse?

Shane Canfield said:

I'm a little lost...is there a website from the company selling Enfuse?

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Shane,
on the pangea-site, you can buy for 20 $ the front-end-Gui, so you haven't to go to the command-line, = enfuse, and not to compile it yourself, so its much more userfriendly. The front-end is for mac only.

The enfuse-application itself is - open source - and in the same folder as Bracketeer.

You can try the demo, but not save any files.
I went for the licence, to see it in 100%, and I admit, it does a very good job:

After a few tests, the enfuse/Braketeer results looked similar to some previously done in Photomatix, but much easier to do and faster. My first impression is, that the shadows - 3/4- tones look nicer/better defined in enfuse, than in Photomatix.

BTW: Included in that licence, the 20 $ is Panoviewer too, a PS-plugin which allows to view a flat, rectilinear Panorama as a sphere in PS.

I'm trying it now....

Yesterday I tried Photomatix and that's doing some great things. Today I'm trying Bracketeer and the initial result from the defaults is very good. I'm lazy so took one file I shot with my p20 and converted the RAW file twice with 2ev difference and ran it through Bracketteer. These are 16bit, 95mB tiffs and its taking about 3-4 minutes for the program to enfuse with the default settings. I didn't time it but I'm pretty sure photomatix was faster (beta 3) but the result was pretty good with bracketeer without any work at all.

Thanks to the OP for the heads up on this.

Eric

Eric Hiss said:

Yesterday I tried Photomatix and that's doing some great things. Today I'm trying Bracketeer and the initial result from the defaults is very good. I'm lazy so took one file I shot with my p20 and converted the RAW file twice with 2ev difference and ran it through Bracketteer. These are 16bit, 95mB tiffs and its taking about 3-4 minutes for the program to enfuse with the default settings. I didn't time it but I'm pretty sure photomatix was faster (beta 3) but the result was pretty good with bracketeer without any work at all.

Thanks to the OP for the heads up on this.

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You're welcome,

Using Enfuse on dual/multiple conversions from a single Raw file is a very useful thing to do. Registration between the images is perfect because they originated from the same shot. Enfusion e.g. allows to create a shadow rendering and a highlight rendering of the same image, even with different white balances such as warmer shadows if they look too blue or with different amounts of noise reduction, and intelligently fuse them together.

By using several bracketed exposures one can span a very large dynamic range, which can be a lifesaver for some scenes. The only issue in that scenario is that the individual exposures need to be aligned into perfect registration. Fortunately, several Pano software packages are already starting to offer Enfuse functionality, so alignment/registration can be done with the Pano functionality, and Enfuse can be called as the final step to complete the task. One doesn't need to shoot a pano to be able and use Enfuse, a bracketed series also works, although the current Enfuse implementation doesn't handle moving subjects well.

Another use can be with the rendering of HDR files. From an existing 'master' HDR file, one can create several clipped renderings, e.g. in Photoshop by only changing the exposure setting when converting to 16-bit mode. With the resulting shadows and highlights renderings one then uses Enfuse for the fusion into a full tonal range result. Registration will also be perfect in this case, and the software that was used to create the 'master' HDR image probably does have a possibility to reduce subject movement between the individual bracketed exposures.

There's lots of room for creative use, and the Enfuse engine is opensource (donationware actually), so free to try/use. When not used as a helper program for e.g. a Pano application, there now is also a Windows GUI frontend for Enfuse (in addition the Bracketeer version mentioned above), and the Windows version is free.

Watch http://panospace.wordpress.com/downloads/ , under the "Tester / Power Users" section, for the latest versions and packages that use Enfuse (which itself is also updated frequently).

Bart

P.S. There are also several developments with regards to automatic image alignment programs, for bracketed exposures. Things are moving fast, and they're moving in the right direction..., http://panospace.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/take-enfuse-on-a-test-flight/ .

Bart

yes, I found photos with very big dynamics in the scene to be done very good with enfuse.
I hade tried some 5 tiffs, its RAWs beeing bracket by 1.5 f, therefore a range of about 15 stops; and it works fine.

I seems that quite some developers are jumping on enfuse now; there's precision with its EnfuseTake2 . but for 10.5, only.

Kekus from PTMac, and Lensfix - the Mac-counterparth of PTLens (panotools) is building a Gui, too.

Here's a image from the post above; 15fstops of dynamic, enfuse did a great job:

LR/Enfuse

Hi all,

After reading this thread and discovering Enfuse, I got inspired.

The result is a Lightroom plug-in that integrates Lightroom with Enfuse through a convivial interface. No need to install Enfuse, it comes with the plug-in (both Mac and PC). Here's the link:

http://timothyarmes.com/lrenfuse.php

Regards,

Tim

Tim Armes said:

Hi all,

After reading this thread and discovering Enfuse, I got inspired.

The result is a Lightroom plug-in that integrates Lightroom with Enfuse through a convivial interface. No need to install Enfuse, it comes with the plug-in (both Mac and PC). Here's the link:

http://timothyarmes.com/lrenfuse.php

Regards,

Tim

Click to expand...

Wow, Tim. How great one can get? Thanks a million. I can't wait to try it out and report back with some results. But it may be a day or so.

Cheers,

Cem

Tim,

Congrats on the new plug in! You are such a helpful fellow!

Asher

Hi Tim

great idea, straight out of the converter!

I gave the demo a try, but run in some problems:

"Internal error.

dev/LREnfuse.lua:1153:
Access to undefined global LOC."

The bug went away, when restarting LR/optimising the catalog.

On Mac/PPC; 10.4.11, plenty of RAM...
Some other enfuse options I use work fine.

Max Lyons build Tufuse these days, similar to enfuse.

Michael Fontana said:

Max Lyons build Tufuse these days, similar to enfuse.

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Michael,

Max has always been a leader in stitching efforts and his work is impressive.

This new Windows program, seems to be, unfortunately, a command line utility. In the days of DOS, that was normal. We're spoilt with GUI that remove us further from the nitty gritty of what is really being carried out.

I went through TuFuse and found the explanation should be obvious to anyone who could use Pano Tools with all its myraids of command line options. Unfortunately to most of us, it's only partially obvious.

I wonder if anyone is going to write a really good tutorial to make this simple for the rest of us!

Asher

Bart and others,

Another point, how about the ability to use the stacked images to detect and remove noise and also to increase resolution. How do we integrate these features to a workflow?

Asher

Asher

well, I'm sure there will be some GUI's for TuFuse out soon; some discussions are arround for porting it to mac, too. For enfuse, in two monthes, we have 3 GUI's already, on mac only.

As for the workflow:
These tools remove noise already now. Increased resolution is - at the moment - only possible with PhotoAcute, where a calibrated lens makes sense.

Timothy's approach - a LR export - is a very elegant solution; and king for speed and datamanagement; no intermediate files need to be saved initially, reopend and trashed later ... it's done all in Tim's plugin within LR, you can't beat that... as the other enfuse-GUI's can't be loaded from other converters, directly.

today, I just threw away some 70 or 80 GBs of intermediate files for stitching; took me a good while to make sure to trash the right ones, only.....

Asher Kelman said:

Another point, how about the ability to use the stacked images to detect and remove noise and also to increase resolution. How do we integrate these features to a workflow?

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Enfuse/TuFuse results already benefit from a little noise reduction, but it's a side-effect of the exposure blending algorithm rather than the intended goal. By selecting the 'better' exposed pixels from several files, one already gets some reduction of the recorded photon shot noise, especially for the low exposure pixels. That's not the same as the (more effective) noise reduction that can be achieved by averaging multiple shots, though. Enfuse/TuFuse serve a different purpose, dynamic range enhancing tonal blending and/or focus stacking.

They can also enhance DOF resolution by means of 'focus stacking', but that is not the same as e.g. PhotoAcute's super resolution which attempts to enhance the undersampled per-pixel resolution.

It's theoretically possible to start with averaging multiple identical exposures to reduce noise, and increase per pixel resolution in e.g. PhotoAcute. It could be done for several distinctly different exposure levels and/or focus positions which are then 'fused' together for tonal blending and increased DOF. However, this will probably require such a large number of exposures that it's not practical for most use(r)s, especially for non-stationary subjects. It's not the most practical workflow, but it could be done for specific situations.

Bart

Bart_van_der_Wolf said:

........ which are then 'fused' together for tonal blending and increased DOF. However, this will probably require such a large number of exposures that it's not practical for most use(r)s, especially for non-stationary subjects. It's not the most practical workflow, but it could be done for specific situations.
Bart

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Hi Bart, that's what my empiric tests indicate too.
The advantage of PhotoAcute looks to me its ability to register the image, better than enfuse.

A specific situation for increasing DOF can be studio shots, just a example - of architecture modells - with a macro lens. My tests indicate, that quite a lot of shots are required, but it's a track to walk.