Interieur - HDR for bright light / windows?

[Karsten Schneeberger]

I don't know how to deal with hight contrast... I shot an interieur with bright light coming from the two windows. I used my Olympus E-3 and ISO bracketing; for one shot the camera recorded three pictures at 100/200/400 ISO - maybe this are not enough different exposures for HDR...

Does it make any sense to use ISO bracketing at all? How do you usually deal with this situation?

4.8 MB flash panorama: http://karstenschneeberger.com/asiaroom/asiaroom.html

Karsten

 

[Asher Kelman]

Karsten,

A great interior with wonderful shadow patterns on the wall and great colors in the rig and fur. What did you stitch with. APP 2.0 and Giga have more advanced tools for bracketing shots.

Asher

 

[nicolas claris]

Asher
APP 2 is not available yet!

But >1.4.2 does blend quite well…

 

[Karsten Schneeberger]

Hi Asher,

I got stuck on this one... I shot tree rows, 12 pictures per row plus top and bottom. In APP 1.4.2 I always got a badly stitched pano, because there was too extreme RMS error. Then I tried to stitch in PTgui Pro, but I could not insert the top picture without having stitching errors again. So I decided not to show top and bottom view at all.

This was my workflow:

1. Processing all the raw Olympus files with Olympus Studio
2. Photomatix made one picture out of the three ISO bracketed exposures
3. PTgui Pro made on pano out of 36 pictures
4. USM in Photoshop, converting to sRGB
5. Pano2VR finally processed the flash file

Because of this pano I upgraded to a 8-core Mac Pro. All the errors have been driving me almost insane, when I first used xp64, vista64 and ubuntu64 with APP.

My current APP version is still 1.4.2... should I try the beta version?

Karsten

 

[nicolas claris]

Kartsen

The beta version is Windows only (1.9.x)

:-{

 

[Daniel Buck]

ISO bracketing will probably give you more noise than shutter speed bracketing will, I would use shutter speed bracketing.

 

[Klaus Esser]

Hi Asher,

I got stuck on this one... I shot tree rows, 12 pictures per row plus top and bottom. In APP 1.4.2 I always got a badly stitched pano, because there was too extreme RMS error. Then I tried to stitch in PTgui Pro, but I could not insert the top picture without having stitching errors again. So I decided not to show top and bottom view at all.

This was my workflow:

1. Processing all the raw Olympus files with Olympus Studio
2. Photomatix made one picture out of the three ISO bracketed exposures
3. PTgui Pro made on pano out of 36 pictures
4. USM in Photoshop, converting to sRGB
5. Pano2VR finally processed the flash file

Because of this pano I upgraded to a 8-core Mac Pro. All the errors have been driving me almost insane, when I first used xp64, vista64 and ubuntu64 with APP.

My current APP version is still 1.4.2... should I try the beta version?

Karsten

Hi Karsten!

Use bracketing at -2/0/+2 and make HDR and tonemap in Photomatix FIRST. After you have got tonemapped TIFFs or JPGs stitch them in APP.
You also can stitch 3 bracketed layers as TIFFs and make them HDR and tonemap them in Photomatix afterwards.

I can´t imagine why your pano should make problems in APP . .
3x12 pictures isn´t really much stuff. I had about 240 pictures in a pano - using a 4 years old Mac G5 with 8GB RAM and 2x2GHz processors.

The current Alpha2 of APPG uses the GPU additionally - that´s a real speedup on Intel-Macs or PCs.

best, Klaus

P.S.: in my pano "CanGabriel" i had extremely bright light outside. To get a smooth inside i used -2/0/+2 bracketing and made them HDR first, tonemapped them and stitched them in the end.

I´m not familiar with the 1.9APP vcersion - but i doubt the HDR- resp. tonemap-tools would be better than the adjustments in Photomatix!

 

[Daniel Buck]

Hi Karsten!

Use bracketing at -2/0/+2 and make HDR and tonemap in Photomatix FIRST. After you have got tonemapped TIFFs or JPGs stitch them in APP.
You also can stitch 3 bracketed layers as TIFFs and make them HDR and tonemap them in Photomatix afterwards.

I can´t imagine why your pano should make problems in APP . .
3x12 pictures isn´t really much stuff. I had about 240 pictures in a pano - using a 4 years old Mac G5 with 8GB RAM and 2x2GHz processors.

The current Alpha2 of APPG uses the GPU additionally - that´s a real speedup on Intel-Macs or PCs.

best, Klaus

P.S.: in my pano "CanGabriel" i had extremely bright light outside. To get a smooth inside i used -2/0/+2 bracketing and made them HDR first, tonemapped them and stitched them in the end.

I´m not familiar with the 1.9APP vcersion - but i doubt the HDR- resp. tonemap-tools would be better than the adjustments in Photomatix!

You don't need to do -2/0/+2 if you just have areas that are to bright. You'd be better off doing -4/-2/0 to get as much highlight detail as you can

 

[Asher Kelman]

Hi Karsten!

Use bracketing at -2/0/+2 and make HDR and tonemap in Photomatix FIRST. After you have got tonemapped TIFFs or JPGs stitch them in APP.
You also can stitch 3 bracketed layers as TIFFs and make them HDR and tonemap them in Photomatix afterwards.

I can´t imagine why your pano should make problems in APP . .
3x12 pictures isn´t really much stuff. I had about 240 pictures in a pano - using a 4 years old Mac G5 with 8GB RAM and 2x2GHz processors.

The current Alpha2 of APPG uses the GPU additionally - that´s a real speedup on Intel-Macs or PCs.

best, Klaus

P.S.: in my pano "CanGabriel" i had extremely bright light outside. To get a smooth inside i used -2/0/+2 bracketing and made them HDR first, tonemapped them and stitched them in the end.

I´m not familiar with the 1.9APP vcersion - but i doubt the HDR- resp. tonemap-tools would be better than the adjustments in Photomatix!

Klaus,

We appreciate having you here!

I too have the similar G5 but with dual 1.8GHZ processors and 6 MB of RAM. So how long did it take to render your 240 picture pano with your G5? Also can one benefit from just an upgrade to a better graphics card, or do we need the Intel processor? If one could leverage the graphics card that would be way less expensive. Do you have both machines now? If so it would be so great for you to make such as test with two graphics cards!

This use of the graphic card for rendering would also benefit CS4 and Aperture. So it's a very interesting idea. I could imagine that updating one's scratch disc plus a new graphics card might be a substantial speed up. but by how much?


Asher

 

[nicolas claris]

but by how much?

At least by the price of an Intel Mac…

 

[Asher Kelman]

At least by the price of an Intel Mac…

What speed increase would one get by upgrading the Graphics card, just that for software that use the GC that would include CS4, Aperture and also Autopanopro?

 

[Valentin Arfire]

hi Karsten,

I like your image with the following remarks:
the natural daylight confronted to the interior (tungsten?) gives a lot of trouble and raises some conflicts - maybe you could obtain the details and the appropriate colors from each shot then bracket them and stitch the result? I'm not sure the effort to stitch the numberous photos with bracketed images is reasonable - probably is very extensive; if I may, I'd advice you to avoid any jpeg and only ultimately make a compression in pano2vr to an internet size

I think you could limit not the zenit/nadir but rather the zoom because at the maximum one can discover slight stitching errors

regards,

 

[Klaus Esser]

Hi Asher!

"So how long did it take to render your 240 picture pano with your G5?"

Rendering was for an about 720MPix pano around 1,5 hours. That´s okay. But the real problem is editing such big stitches. I tried to stitch in PTGui also - terrible.
More and more often i realize that PTGui can´t stitch scenes which APP does with a smile.
On the other hand there are scenes - very rarely - which PTGui does faster: very strong geometrically structured scenes when moving clouds mirrors in the surfaces.
Here PTGui uses the clear structures while APP tries ti find subpixels in the clouds - and because they´re moving it messes up control points.
The render-engine uses both processors. But the editor doesn´t. So it can become boring to wait for every little change during editing projection, color correction or geometrical corrections and adding points, reorganize the stitch and so on.

Here the GPU - i tested it on my son´s PC with the actual APP-version - speeds it up VERY much!
The PC runs with 46bit Vista.

Usually the biggest win on speed is using a very fast HD (Raptor)! That brings around 100% plus - as some tests showed.

best, Klaus

 

[Karsten Schneeberger]

Hi Klaus,

the problem was that the lines at the wall/ceiling and sideboard did not fit well together, as long as I tried to stitch the whole scene including zenith and nadir.

Without zenit and nadir, I even got errors in PTgui, but then deleted the control points with greatest distance error... finally got this pano that is quite ok.

In my workflow I tried to stay as long within 16-bit color space...

1. Olympus Studio RAW -> 16-bit TIFF
2. Photomatix 3 different exposed 16-bit TIFF -> tonemap 16-bit TIFF
3. PTgui Pro 3x12 pictures 16-bit TIFF -> Pano 8-bit TIFF (after all I am impatient now)
4. USM in Photoshop, converting to sRGB, 8-bit TIFF
5. Pano2VR finally processed the flash file from the 8-bit TIFF

I have the Apple RAID card in my Mac Pro and this does not allow me to run XP or Vista native in Boot Camp. I use RAID 0 on three internal harddisks only as scratch disk or for temporary storage. I store my work exclusively on 1 gbit NAS when finished.

Is there something better than APP 1.4.2 which I may use natively in Mac OS X?

I will try to expose +2/0/-2 in the future and see how this may improve my results.

Karsten

 

[Klaus Esser]

Hi Klaus,

the problem was that the lines at the wall/ceiling and sideboard did not fit well together, as long as I tried to stitch the whole scene including zenith and nadir.

Without zenit and nadir, I even got errors in PTgui, but then deleted the control points with greatest distance error... finally got this pano that is quite ok.

In my workflow I tried to stay as long within 16-bit color space...

1. Olympus Studio RAW -> 16-bit TIFF
2. Photomatix 3 different exposed 16-bit TIFF -> tonemap 16-bit TIFF
3. PTgui Pro 3x12 pictures 16-bit TIFF -> Pano 8-bit TIFF (after all I am impatient now)
4. USM in Photoshop, converting to sRGB, 8-bit TIFF
5. Pano2VR finally processed the flash file from the 8-bit TIFF

I have the Apple RAID card in my Mac Pro and this does not allow me to run XP or Vista native in Boot Camp. I use RAID 0 on three internal harddisks only as scratch disk or for temporary storage. I store my work exclusively on 1 gbit NAS when finished.

Is there something better than APP 1.4.2 which I may use natively in Mac OS X?

I will try to expose +2/0/-2 in the future and see how this may improve my results.

Karsten

Hii Karsten!

Generating HDR from ONE RAW - that´s what i read in your words - isn´t good!
Better shoot 3 or more different exposures.
I´m doing all my panos with APP 1.4.2 on my G5 - never have any problems to stitch. Your interior isn´t in any way complicated to stitch.

look at my "tour" example - the light was extreme: very bright and sharp sunlight outside (early afternoon) and very shaded inside.
I shot - as i said already - bracketing -2/0/+2, mapped in Photomatix and stitched in APP. In none of the panos i had to edit or correct a single bit. Just used color-correction. That´s very valuable.

If you want you can send me your picture-set as JPGs.

Besides: 16bit TIFF makes no sense when generated from a single RAW shot . . . ;-)

Shoot bracketed JPG and handle them as JPG - best quality - in Photomatix and then in APP . . If you´re NOT shooting big sizes for highend-higloss magazins with very excellent printing.

Detecting and stitching and editing will be much faster.

best, Klaus

P.S.:
"Is there something better than APP 1.4.2 which I may use natively in Mac OS X?"

I really tried ALL stitchers - APP in my eyes is by far the best. Sometimes StitcherUnlimited from RealWiz is more versatile, sometime it´s PTGui. The controlpoint editor in PTGui is very good - but in APP you need one rarely. And that´s in my eyes even better . . ;-)

 

[Karsten Schneeberger]

Hi Klaus,

I think you misunderstood how I got the three different exposed pictures. The Olympus E-3 has a nice feature called ISO-bracketing. You take one picture and the camera records three raw files on the cf card. Those three raw files are 100/200/400 ISO, but identical in shutter speed and aperture.

Maybe this feature of the camera is nonsense, or almost the same as to "Generating HDR from ONE RAW", as you assumed I did...

I already took a look and extensive walk through your tour... very well done!

Karsten

 

[Daniel Buck]

What speed increase would one get by upgrading the Graphics card, just that for software that use the GC that would include CS4, Aperture and also Autopanopro?

I'm curious about this too. As far as I know, graphics cards will not help in the actual processing of images. They might help with viewing panoramas, but I would not expect any speed increases in the processing of images from just a video card update. Processing is handled by the processor, and the RAM. Maybe some applications dump a little bit of this work onto the processor on the graphics card, but I cant imagine that it would help a whole lot.

 

[Klaus Esser]

I'm curious about this too. As far as I know, graphics cards will not help in the actual processing of images. They might help with viewing panoramas, but I would not expect any speed increases in the processing of images from just a video card update. Processing is handled by the processor, and the RAM. Maybe some applications dump a little bit of this work onto the processor on the graphics card, but I cant imagine that it would help a whole lot.

Hi Daniel!

More and more applications use the additional power of a GPU. These are much faster than any CPU in some aspcts related to image- and geometrical processing.
Aperture uses GPU, Cinema4D V.11 too and AutopanoPro 1.9 Alpha supports it. So do Maya and familiar apps.

Especially editing gains VERY much speed - final rendering i think dosn´t get really much faster. Here the CPU speed and a very fast HD gains about 100% additional speedup using a WD "Raptor" for example.

Final rendering can comfortably run over night - but editing is a mess on a slow system when you have to wait minutes for a simple change of projection or even just correcting some points or setting a new center.
All THIS procedures are VERY much faster using a GPU.

Get a demo of APP and see by yourself!

best, Klaus

 

[Klaus Esser]

Hi Klaus,

I think you misunderstood how I got the three different exposed pictures. The Olympus E-3 has a nice feature called ISO-bracketing. You take one picture and the camera records three raw files on the cf card. Those three raw files are 100/200/400 ISO, but identical in shutter speed and aperture.

Maybe this feature of the camera is nonsense, or almost the same as to "Generating HDR from ONE RAW", as you assumed I did...

I already took a look and extensive walk through your tour... very well done!

Karsten

Hi Karsten!

Yes - i misunderstood. To me it wasn´t clear which method you used. Lots of people are processing a single RAW file to "HDR" . . . . which is a pseudo-"HDR" i fact.

I realized that bracketing-steps of 1 need at least 5 or more shots for having a usefull range to prodess HDR out of it. Therefore i always use -2/0/+2 in most cases and 9 steps on special occasions using the "Breeze" software for Canon DSLRs on a laptop.

9 and more steps - up to 26f-stops with a SpheronHDR camera - represents the "crème de la crème" of HDR-photography.

http://www.spheron.de/en/intruvision/solutions/spherocam-hdr.html
http://www.spheron.de/fileadmin/user_upload/spheron/img/images/Scenecam_Solution_sRGB.png
http://www.spheron.de/en/intruvision/references.html

best, Klaus

 

[Asher Kelman]

Hi Daniel!

More and more applications use the additional power of a GPU. These are much faster than any CPU in some aspcts related to image- and geometrical processing.
Aperture uses GPU, Cinema4D V.11 too and AutopanoPro 1.9 Alpha supports it. So do Maya and familiar apps.

Especially editing gains VERY much speed - final rendering i think dosn´t get really much faster. Here the CPU speed and a very fast HD gains about 100% additional speedup using a WD "Raptor" for example.

Final rendering can comfortably run over night - but editing is a mess on a slow system when you have to wait minutes for a simple change of projection or even just correcting some points or setting a new center.
All THIS procedures are VERY much faster using a GPU.

Get a demo of APP and see by yourself!

best, Klaus

Klaus,

a 100% increase is generally far more one sees in upgrading the computer. One can get a small 15,000 rpm Hard Drive or even 2 in raid for scratch. The question remains as to whether or not 64 BIT calculations can be handed over to the Faster Graphics cards and which ones work in the dual 1.8/2.0GHX Mac Towers? That price might make it worthwhile especially if the card could also be used in a new Intel machine down the road when I'm richer!

So what do you know? Did you try supercharging your G5 2.0 GHZ dual processor Tower or just gave up on the old girl and went for the intel.

Asher

 

[Klaus Esser]

Klaus,

a 100% increase is generally far more one sees in upgrading the computer. One can get a small 15,000 rpm Hard Drive or even 2 in raid for scratch. The question remains as to whether or not 64 BIT calculations can be handed over to the Faster Graphics cards and which ones work in the dual 1.8/2.0GHX Mac Towers? That price might make it worthwhile especially if the card could also be used in a new Intel machine down the road when I'm richer!

So what do you know? Did you try supercharging your G5 2.0 GHZ dual processor Tower or just gave up on the old girl and went for the intel.

Asher

The problem is: the newer Macs don´t have AGP slots for graphic cards - they use PCIexpress.
So a GC from your G5 wouldn´t work in an actual McPro. That´s Apple how we hate them . .

And only the actual and upcoming cards - provide GPU use for applications other than games.
The applications must support it. Newer apps don´t support G5 any more.

For that reason i decided to build up a PC running Linux - the same power as a MacPro you get for half the price of a MacPro. And it´s a lot more flexible in using different hardware. Which is - to be honest - more risky than on a Mac being a "closed shop" . . but things will change faster and faster . .

I´ll keep my G5 as a workstation for most of my apps. And add the "other architecture" for "special tasks" like APP, Cinema and some viewers/editors which are available only for PCs.
The MS project of panoramasites is very interesting.

best, Klaus

in the APP forum are some threads related to that theme!

 

[Laurent LSJ Saint Jean]

Lovely Interior.
Next time you could try the following:

• Shoot Raw,
• Depending on your lens, tilt your camera up 5 to 8 degrees, and forget about the Nadir. Normally, the overlap is sufficient to also take care of the zenith.
• Bracket with speed, not ISO.
• PTgui will do a fine job of doing the multi exposure blending. In your case, if you have bright sunlight wiht a naturally lit interior, you need to bracket 7 x 1ev stops. 3 under and 3 over, 1 normally exposed.
• If you are using some interior lights, mitigate by setting your white balance to 4550K or 5000.
• PTgui will take care of exposure fusion together with the stitching, at once.
• Stay clear of actual HDR ... i find there is too much hallow/ghosty/pixel frankeinstein created. Use enfuse.
• You should be able to correct your stitching errors my running down your controls point table to under 2 by running several times over the optimiser.
• Otherwise, use the PS tools such as Liquify and patch tools to mend the seams.
• Process the equirectangular as large as you can in PTgui. Thiis means select "maximal size" in your output.
• Run through a denoise/sharpening process in PS.
• Then inside pano2vr, you can optimise your VR/qtvr/Flash Vr outputs in several ways. i keep the tile size to 1100 for a descent rendering speed/ quality on 1900 px screens.

Hope this help.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Hi Laurent,

Welcome to OPF and thanks for the immediate feedback on this Pano. Do you use APP or it comes short. The latest version has some powerful new features. The anti-ghosting is pretty impressive. It's great to have another panoramist here who is PTGUI savvy. I'm interested to know what computer you run on, how it's set up and how many files do you deal with to get your 7 complete sets of images! How long does it take and how many images are there per set?

Thanks again,

Asher

 

[Klaus Esser]

Stay clear of actual HDR ... i find there is too much hallow/ghosty/pixel frankeinstein created. Use enfuse.

Hi Laurent!

I can not agree to that statemant, sorry. HDR is a widely misunderstood tool.
I always use HDR in the following way:
shooting braketed RAW or JPG: -2/0/+2
combine it in Photomatix using "tone-compressing" (neutral) or "tone-enhancing" - which gives an extremely wide range of settings.
saving as TIFFs
stitching the compressed/mapped pictures in APP - rarely ANY editing needed. I had definitely more trouble using PTGui than i ever had using APP - and i used PTGUI and the StitcherUnlimited for a long time.
rendering with smartblend
saving as TIFF 16bit

IF used correctly you never realize any HDR - but you definitely would realize if it wasn´t there . . ;-)
(this is a cutout from a spherical VR pano)

best, Klaus

 

[Asher Kelman]

Klaus and Karsten,

Both your interior scenes look rich and natural. With yours Klaus, I might consider adding a tad more light coming from the doors and windows to the walls and that will add some extra verb to the already great photograph. The reflections in the glass of the picture frames adds a good sense of reality as it is.


Asher

 

[Laurent LSJ Saint Jean]

Hi Laurent,

Welcome to OPF and thanks for the immediate feedback on this Pano. Do you use APP or it comes short. The latest version has some powerful new features. The anti-ghosting is pretty impressive. It's great to have another panoramist here who is PTGUI savvy. I'm interested to know what computer you run on, how it's set up and how many files do you deal with to get your 7 complete sets of images! How long does it take and how many images are there per set?

Thanks again,

Asher

Hello Asher,
li
Thanks for the welcome. I don't consider myself a panographer yet, but working towards it.

Not sure what APP is ( Auto Pano Pro?) No i don't use it. I really should try it, but when 1 application is doing the job without bug, i tend to stick with it, and not even upgrade. I've been using PTmac and PTgui. To produce an equirectangular bracketed and blended for 360 output, at present, if we are in a high contrast situation such as the first example, i only shoot every 90 degree, no nadir, no zenith, and about 7 to 9 bracketed shots of 1ev each. But you don't have to always bracket, far from it There are 2 example, 1st one 4 single shots, 2nd 4x7 bracketed. (pls forgive the mess... was 40miles wind at -10!).
Please bear in mind i shoot mainly for real estate, and don't have much time for "proper" high definition panoramas. I was using a D300 for 360's with a NodalNinja3 and Sigma 8mm/f3.5, but i'm expecting a NodalNinja5 i'll use with my D700 and a Nikon 16mm/f2.8 fisheye. I'll then be shooting 6 around at 60 degree angle, still tilted, and for better quality panos, will take a zenith shot.t

I run on an iMac intel 2.16ghz and 3gb Ram. Workflow is shoot raw in NEF, batch process in Capture NX2 to tiff, assemble in PTgui (via enfuse, not HDR) then cleanup-denoise-sharpen in PS, build in pano2vr for quick flash i then output via some php builder, par of a website designed specifically for building VirtualTours via interactive floorlplan. I have 2 versions, one building self-contained static web-pages and one built within a heavily customised wordpress real estate CMS (we're now switching to ExpressioinEngine-CI). But I also use FlashPanoramaPlayer and looking at KRpano for more complex virtual tours. Still not quiet happy with speed rendering and actual floorplan navigation within the panos. Virtual Tours is what i'm mostly interested in, and this includes showing still images, and soon video and sound. Hence why i've been quiet slow with the actual panorama part. That's a job on its own, with very specific skills.

 

[Laurent LSJ Saint Jean]

Hi Laurent!

I can not agree to that statemant, sorry. HDR is a widely misunderstood tool.
I always use HDR in the following way:
shooting braketed RAW or JPG: -2/0/+2
combine it in Photomatix using "tone-compressing" (neutral) or "tone-enhancing" - which gives an extremely wide range of settings.
saving as TIFFs
stitching the compressed/mapped pictures in APP - rarely ANY editing needed. I had definitely more trouble using PTGui than i ever had using APP - and i used PTGUI and the StitcherUnlimited for a long time.
rendering with smartblend
saving as TIFF 16bit

IF used correctly you never realize any HDR - but you definitely would realize if it wasn´t there . . ;-)
(this is a cutout from a spherical VR pano)

best, Klaus

Hi Klaus,
Thanks for your worflow suggestion. It seems to work nicely for you. I will try it asap. I've had my own experiences with HDR, and wasn't too please with the result. Don't get me wrong, HDR is a very powerful tool, but i'd use it more as a creative one. I shoot mainly for Real Estate/Architecture, and the final result must be as close as possible to the original.
Look up on forums and you'll see i'm not the only one saying Exposure blending as opposed to HDR gives a more "natural" result.
I do use Photomatix btw, and like it very much, again, for creative images.
Also, speed is the issue. I blend+stitch at once, inside PTgui. The HDR option is there, but i don't use it, again, because of time. I know the enfuse is always spot on, so i click to batch, and next morning, i get the images i need.

I promised myself i'll make a test, comparing Flash-enfuse-hdr. I started doing the FLash Vs Enfuse comparaison with a couple of still images. But I put this on my todo list !

 

[Tim Armes]

Blending

I don't know how to deal with hight contrast... I shot an interieur with bright light coming from the two windows. I used my Olympus E-3 and ISO bracketing; for one shot the camera recorded three pictures at 100/200/400 ISO - maybe this are not enough different exposures for HDR...

Does it make any sense to use ISO bracketing at all? How do you usually deal with this situation?

Hi Karsten,

I 've recently blogged about this very subject. Personally I prefer blending to HDR when natural looking images are the objective - I find it's considerably quicker and easier.

I take up to 6 shots of the scene and blend them.

"Enfuse" is an excellent open source blending application and there are several graphical interfaces available for it. I even wrote a Lightroom plugin that makes things easy for LR users. You may find my blog entry useful:

http://www.timothyarmes.com/blog/?p=73

Tim