Question on Auto Alignment

Greetings,

may be some of you can help with that little problem.

Example:

I shoot a 3x exposures handheld . Back home I wanted to add a subtle HDR setting to the scene, but because I did not use a tripod, Photomatix did not align the 3 pictures nicely. So I went to photoshop.

1. opened a new document

2. opened all three Tif and dragged them into the center of the document, so they appear as layers in the document.

3. chose edit/auto align, reposition only, PS proceeded aligning based on content. Afterwards the pictures were moved to the left upper corner away from the center

4. I croped out a bit from each side to be on the safe side, and safed all 3 tif's

5. Back to photomatix, but still the picture looked the same, misaligned, literally unusable.

Now, the handheld misalignment must be minimal. I do have a steady hand.

My question is, how can I fix handheld misalignments of multi exposures prior to sending files to Photomatix.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have a couple of good shots, that I could not use in this particular workflow if there is no solution. If there is anything else that can be done other than using a tripod, let me know please!

Best,
Georg

Make sure all three layers are selected before you do the align, then do Edit>Auto align, Auto. The advantage of Auto at the last step is it will free transform the layers to accommodate for the minor parallax and rotation errors you induced while capturing freehand.

Cheers,

Jack_Flesher said:

Make sure all three layers are selected before you do the align, then do Edit>Auto align, Auto. The advantage of Auto at the last step is it will free transform the layers to accommodate for the minor parallax and rotation errors you induced while capturing freehand.

Cheers,

Click to expand...

Just what Jack said. After that, crop the picture and use the function Scripts>Export layers to files to create 3 individual tif files from the layers. Use those tif files as an input to photomatix.

HTH.

Cem_Usakligil said:

Just what Jack said. After that, crop the picture and use the function Scripts>Export layers to files to create 3 individual tif files from the layers. Use those tif files as an input to photomatix.

Click to expand...

Yes, make sure to crop the image stack in order to remove any (transparent) edges resulting from the realignment. If you don't, then the edges will be seen as image detail and the alignment may become undone by Photomatix.

Bart

Jack_Flesher said:

Make sure all three layers are selected before you do the align, then do Edit>Auto align, Auto. The advantage of Auto at the last step is it will free transform the layers to accommodate for the minor parallax and rotation errors you induced while capturing freehand.

Cheers,

Click to expand...

You did it again! LOL, this did the trick! Many thanks Jack.

Cem_Usakligil said:

Just what Jack said. After that, crop the picture and use the function Scripts>Export layers to files to create 3 individual tif files from the layers. Use those tif files as an input to photomatix.

HTH.

Click to expand...

Hi Cem,

thanks for that, while Jack's suggestion worked fine, somehow the photomatix results looked unexpectedly "weired". I did not know about that script and will try this instead.

Bart_van_der_Wolf said:

Yes, make sure to crop the image stack in order to remove any (transparent) edges resulting from the realignment. If you don't, then the edges will be seen as image detail and the alignment may become undone by Photomatix.

Bart

Click to expand...

Hi Bart,

Yup, the edges are so minimal, you really have to look hard to see them.

Georg Baumann said:

You did it again! LOL, this did the trick! Many thanks Jack.

Click to expand...

Happy to help you out anytime Georg!

Cheers,