This thread is a bit misleading. The titles is only about HDR, but focus stacking and pano are discussed as well.
I would love and need these blending abilities. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a pro or not. Really.
Focus stacking (or bracketin) is really important in macro, but also in landscape photography. Suggesting to use other programs is not good at all, because this requires to create a TIFF file that you transfer from DxO to another program and vice versa. You then loose all the flexibility of DxO RAW processing. And processing the images before exporting them to another program is poor workaround. I want my focus stacking to be done before I do my exposure adjustments, conversion to B&W, so on and so forth.
Same for panorama. I don’t want to break the RAW processing chain by exporting TIFF files.
And same for HDR, I want to remain in my RAW workflow at all times.
As I mentioned in a reply to your other thread on panoramas, as soon as you go beyond one image, you are no longer processing a RAW file but several bitmaps. Even Photoshop doesn’t perform these manipulations at a RAW level - it converts them to bitmap first.
I see some logic in your point about HDR but as far as panoramas go, it’s really pick the photo you like out of the panorama (probably one of the center ones but not necessarily), grade it, apply that grade to all the photos in the panorama, export and then stitch.
I’ve been shooting a lot more panoramas since I acquired an iPhone 11 Pro. The camera does all the hard work, including incorporating HDR in the panorama.
I can hardly imagine how much trouble it would be to create HDR panoramas of this quality by hand.
These are close to in-camera versions. I have used DxO PhotoLab (of course) to slightly improve tonality (general direction, higher contrast) and apply FilmPack’s Color Negative Film profile, Agfa Vista 200. I also removed some lens flare.
The originals are 16382 pixels across. For uploading, I’ve resized them to 6000px. To get rid of the phone sensor effect, it would be necessary to resize down to no more than 12000px. I’m not a printing expert so I don’t know how big a high quality print would be possible.
There is one very serious flaw in one of the panoramas. If I planned to more with that image, I’d have to do some very serious work, using another image.
I’m no fan of iPhone photography for RAW work and/or portrait, but for HDR panoramas it’s an extraordinary tool. Panoramas are taken with the main 26mm lens in vertical so the base model iPhone 11 or the new iPhone SE could take exactly the same shots.
Can’t help but thinking of that thread after reading today’s DPReview test of PL4. This topic was mentioned several times throughout the review.
Straight at the beginning:
Key Takeaways:
…
No support for multi-shot imaging or Fujifilm X-Trans images
During the review:
So what’s missing when compared to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom? […] Multi-shot editing functions like panoramas, focus stacking, resolution enhancement or HDR are not supported.
In conclusion:
What we don’t:
…
No support for multi-shot imaging
DPReview is a fairly good website as regards photography reviews imho. Their point of view on this specific topic should be accounted for as well as ours.
A foot forward in this direction would be to incorporate DNG support into the NIK Collection. I prefer to export RAW files to DNG via the “Export with optical corrections and NR only” export feature before performing the HDR merge rather than performing the merge directly on the RAW files. DXO’s excellent body/lens corrections and Deep Prime NR are not available for use on the already merged HDR RGB file.
I think what we need here is a multi-shot support. For many users it’s not limited to HDR. It’s about HDR, yes, but panorama and focus stacking as well. All these features are basically based on the same requirement: merging multiple shots and this can’t be solved only by incorporating DNG to Nik Collection.
Or check out easyHDR3. It works great with jpegs or TIFFs prepared in PhotoLab. I tested easyHDR against Aurora 2019, Photoshop CS6, Nik HDR and Affinity Photo for you last year (sample image at the link). It’s the only HDR tool who could handle the deghosting of windmills well.
