News: SNS-HDR, a new realistic tonemapper

Cem,

You are so industrious! Are you sleeping! Your new, subdued version of the tone mapping using SNS-HDR is much calmer. Now I wonder if this is where a simple layering of the super SNS-HDR version masked to show only the fantastic clouds could, perhaps finish the image with targeted richness.

Not that the sky is the feature that's the most important. But as an example, that proposed version might have an edge that's a better representative of all that's in that shot.

I believe in the potential value of considering levels of importance through varied emphasis of features, by whatever stratagem one can bring to a composition. This would be once such circumstance where an emphasis on God's sky could even be logical. After all, the heavens we see a glimpse of here, might even surpass the splendid magnificence of man's most special work.

Kudos to you and Bart! This new software promises to play an important role in our image processing toolbox.

Asher

Cem and Bart,

Thanks for the info re the pro version. I'd tried to visit the home site before but it timed out. OK this time though.

I've just tried the pro version (praise be that the GUI's in English!). Here are my initial impressions.

Positive:
Excellent natural colours.
Good shadow detail.
A comprehensive set of sensible controls.

Negative:
It's unbearably slow - almost ten mins to create and tone-map an HDR from 3 exposures. Admittedly my PC's not in the first flush of youth, but all other software manages to at least break into a canter.
There's quite a lot of noise in the sky.

On the whole, I was (eventually) very impressed.

Regards,

Stuart

StuartRae said:

I've just tried the pro version (praise be that the GUI's in English!). Here are my initial impressions.

Positive:
Excellent natural colours.
Good shadow detail.
A comprehensive set of sensible controls.

Negative:
It's unbearably slow - almost ten mins to create and tone-map an HDR from 3 exposures. Admittedly my PC's not in the first flush of youth, but all other software manages to at least break into a canter.
There's quite a lot of noise in the sky.

On the whole, I was (eventually) very impressed.

Click to expand...

Hi Stuart,

Yes, it benefits from a powerful processor/memory configuration, but given the time it saves in postprocessing it's a trade-off. I have a pretty fast system myself, and it still takes a bit of time, but it's very bearable.

The noise in the sky is something that's a bit inherent to the type of extreme processing, but could possibly be improved (or user adjusted) when the program is a bit more mature. Version 1.01 is already better than 1.0 was.

I have been experimenting, and for the current implementation I've found that its possible to produce very low noise images when enough small increment brackets are used. I have to test some other image sets, but a 2/3rd bracket distance seems optimal on my 1Ds3. Of course the individual exposures should be as low ISO/noise as possible.

Auto-alignment for handheld bracketed shots needs to be improved as well, but one could for the time being also use Photomatix or Photoshop (or a panostitcher that can preserve the intermediate tiles) for the alignment only. Photomatix has better ghost removal than SNS in its current state.

SNS-HDR a simple comparison

Hi folks,

There have been several intermediate updates to the program, and it has become even better than it was (but not yet perfect). To give an impression of one kind of rendering one can get out of it, I've converted an exposure bracketing stack which was made to improve highlight detail, and compare it to a straight Raw conversion (+ a bit of highlight and shadow adjustment in Photoshop) from Canon's DPP.

The goal is to show the realistic tonemapping that SNS-HDR is capable of, although one could of course also spend a lot of postprocessing time on layer blending in Photoshop.


While the original DPP conversion captures the lighting condition at the scene the best (within the limited dynamic range of a simple tonemapping), it is technically inadequate because the highlights are severely clipped and the shadows are dull and featureless. How much of that one decides to restore with SNS-HDR, is a matter of taste, so the above is just one possibe conversion. One can also push SNS-HDR to 'turn-on-the-lights' like in the following example, but that would lose too much of the original atmosphere IMHO.


The SNS-HDR conversions were based on its Raw input conversion capabilities, no intermediate files were produced.

Cheers,
Bart

Bart,

This is a fascinating story of progress. The SNS-HDR appears to have more depth in the upper right, mage #2. A gradient going from #2 in the b.g. to #1 n the foreground would have the most depth, of course.

Asher

New SNS-HDR version 1.3.0 was published today

Hi Folks,

This is just FYI.

Sebastian has been working diligently on the improved version of SNS-HDR (for Windows OS only), and he has added several very useful features, in addition to further improvements on the program's tonemapping logic like avoidance of halo artifacts and noise.

The pro-version is very feature rich, but can also be operated by simply clicking on one of the predefined settings from a list with thumbnails (the list can be edited with one's own preferences). SNS-HDR is sofar the tonemapping application that can deliver the most natural looking tonemapping of HDR scenes, but it can also produce more over-the-top results should one wish to do that.

Other recent contenders, such as Nik's HDR Efex Pro, or Oloneo PhotoEngine, are much more prone to creating halo artifacts, one of the most clear giveaway clues that an image has been processed to reduce lighting contrast. SNS-HDR handles the challenges very convincingly, and at a competitive price.

Cheers,
Bart