HDRI News

Introducing the Open Camera Controller

2010-03-10T22:40:00.000-08:00

What if you had a programmable touchscreen remote with an 8 hour battery life, that can be fitted to any DSLR? With free apps for extended HDR shooting, timelapse, controlling an affordable telescope mount, sound triggering, and more. All Open Source, driven by a community of enthusiastic photographers like you.

Then you must have an Open Camera Controller.
The catch: you have to build it yourself. Out of a Nintendo DS.

It will be a cool garage project, easy to do and very rewarding. We've done everything to document the whole process. The hardware is subject to Open Source rules as well, so if you're a wizard with electronics we highly welcome your improvement ideas.

This project is brought to you by Steve Chapman, HDRLabs' newest collaborator.

Steve is sort of a legend in Hollywood, known as the go-to-guy for scanning actors, props and sets. In fact, in 2001 my very first job duty in the VFX industry was to character-rig Captain Archer of the Enterprise, which I later found out to be scanned by Steve Chapman himself. And Steve's quite a character as well, which you will discover when you're looking at the comments in his source code...

The Open Camera Controller (OCC) was previously known as PanoCamera. It’s just that the project has grown out of bounds, and while the core program is still the ultimate HDR-panorama-bracketing machine, it now also does astrophotography, sound triggering, e-book manuals, the whole nine yards. And who knows what the Open Source community will come up with… That’s why we put the emphasis on “Open” as in “Whatever you want your camera to do”-platform.

OCC fits HDRLabs like a glove, similar in spirit and open accessibility. That's why it is a top-level project now, housed in the main menu right next to Picturenaut. What was previously the PanoCamera forum, is now a category in the HDRLabs Community. It had only 15 active members, but a ton of great discussions and ideas. If you’re one of these 15 early adopters, congratulations and welcome!

Read more on the OCC project page.

And the Oscar goes to … Paul Debevec

2010-03-07T23:59:00.000-08:00

I’m talking about the Technical Oscar, the stepchild Academy Award that was already out handed last month. It’s dedicated to the unsung heroes of the movie biz, the inventors of groundbreaking technology that makes those flickering lights more and more spectacular every year. After all, it’s still the “Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences”, right?

Paul Debevec, Tim Hawkins, John Monos and Mark Sagar got honored for the design and engineering of the Light Stage capture devices and the image-based facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion pictures.

Their Light Stage is what fueled the production of Avatar, Benjamin Button (VFX Oscar Winner last year), Harry Potter, Superman 3, ect. So, it really is the star behind the scenes; the “thing” that makes photo-real digital actors possible.

Read more on the Lightstage Project page or watch Magic Paul's TED Talk on Digital Emily.

Oh, and my congratulations to everybody who worked on Avatar. Well deserved VFX Oskar. I seriously considered quitting my job and opening a t-shirt shop when I walked out of that movie. It's disturbingly good VFX work!

Christian Bloch

Smart IBL gets on the 3D-World Cover DVD

2010-03-02T23:00:00.000-08:00

It's sometimes funny how communities develop.

At this point there are 4 vendors offering HDRIs as ready-made sIBL sets:

Bob Groothuis with his fabulous Dutch Skies 360 collection
Charles Leo with a huge 120-set library on HDRSource
HDR-VFX offering custom HDRI / sIBL shoots of any scale
And Yours Truly, holding the project together on HDRLabs.

You'd think they're competitors, but no. It's actually a very friendly community that helps each other out all the time. And as Bob Groothuis lands a gig with 3d-World, he happily gives us all a lift.

Winner of this situation is you, the 3d artist community. You'll find a most precious gift glued to the cover of the March issue of 3D-World:

8 Premium sIBL sets for free.

My contribution is an exclusive select from Tokyo, the Tatami Room B. And there's Helipad Night A from our in-house library at EdenFX, with all best wishes from my boss John Gross. This is something you'd normally wouldn't get your hands on. Ever.

See, pure gold on that 3D-World DVD. The US issue comes out in April, UK readers get it mid-March already. Make sure to check for the DVD - not all of the mags actually have one.

This issue also has some really interesting topics about the Linear Workflow and new-school Color Management.

Christian Bloch

PS: As you've come to expect, there's also a new sIBL-of-the-month and new chances to rise to the top in the Hot-on-Flickr gallery.

Updates: HDR PhotoStudio, Promote Firmware, Smart IBL

2010-02-07T21:46:00.000-08:00

The HDR world is in constant flux, there's always something new around the corner.

HDR PhotoStudio 2 on the Mac

HDR PhotoStudio has been last year's shooting star. I already raved about it here and Jack Howard has a great article here.

Even Kirt Witte wouldn't stop mentioning to our Tokyo crowd the awesomeness of HDR PhotoStudio and it's unique Veiling Glare tool

. And I absolutely agree! Wait, no - I like the Whitebalance and Color Tuning tools

tools even more.

Or maybe, what I love best is the philosophy behind HDR PhotoStudio: it lets you edit and tweak an HDR image, while taking full advantage of all available HDR image data at every step.
That's way beyond tonemapping. That's professional image editing on a production-quality level. These are color tools formerly only known in $4000,- VFX Compositing packages like Fusion or Nuke! And maybe even a bit better. I find it invaluable now for preparing HDRIs for lighting.

And now Unified Color answers the #1 user request: Make it work on the Mac! What they deliver is not just some lame conversion, instead they rewired the entire program to feel native on any OS. They also made a 64-bit Windows version, which I personally appreciate even more. And as special surprise with cherry on top it also installs a Lightroom plugin. Now it's just a matter of selecting my brackets in Lightroom, Right-click → Export to HDR PhotoStudio, and done (just like the Photomatix plugin).

Promote Control Firmware Update 1.16

The other revolutionary newcomer from last year has been updated as well. With the Promote Control most Canons and Nikons get a a turbo-charged Autobracketing mode.

See, the folks from HDRSoft are sharing with us this list of AEB modes of all cameras (which a great collaboration - thanks Geraldine!). It's a very long and mostly sad list, because the standard is 3-frame bracketing and/or 1 EV spacing. How pathetic.

The Promote Control fixes this situation, and allows arbitrary number of frames, with any EV spacing. No, it's not perfect, and I'm still having my complaints about the user interface and button layout - but it's the best we have right now and it does a damn great job in shooting pictures.

And now, with the new firmware, it also displays a preview of the HDR sequence, captures 9999 frames of timelapse, and can be intelligently slowed down to wait for slower cameras. All features that user requested in the most epic thread of our forum - so why am I telling you all this anyway? Promote developer Arty also says new holster accessories are on the way, soon you can strap that baby right on your tripod or panohead.

Get the Promote Firmware Update here.

Smart IBL for Lightwave v2.2

Great, my own software update now pales in comparison.

It's a maintenance update, okay: faster, more stable, a few more preferences and presets. Ready for the linear workflow in LW HardCore. Highly recommended.
If you have Auto-Update enabled your Smart IBL plugin should update itself, otherwise get it here.

Tokyo Transmissions

2010-01-28T21:46:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I haven't told you anything about Japan yet.

Yes, I went to SIGGRAPH Asia in December.

Did a Guerilla book signing session and held, together with Kirt Witte, our annual course on HDRI for Artists.

I really think our presentation was much better than last year in LA. We did better hand-offs, spiced it with more production examples, had more visual eyecandy all over the place. We did some extensive taping of the show, but it didn't turn out to be as useful as I was hoping.
One of these days you'll get to see our show, I promise - either in person or in some properly remastered digital equivalent.

For now I can only offer you the course notes at www.hdrlabs.com/siggraph/. It's basically an update of last year's course notes, and if you're a frequent visitor of HDRLabs you have seen most of the material already....

My favorite area at SIGGRAPH is always the Emerging Technologies floor.
Here's what I discovered:

Inflatable Panorama Dome

Why should your niece have all the fun in that bouncy castle? I find the idea of an inflatable panorama dome ingenious. Throw it on the back of a pickup truck, and you're ready to run your own tripped out festival. Just the entrance looked strangely uninviting, like it would swallow visitors. I wish there would be a better design solution for that.

Panorama Ball Vision

As an alternative, how about a fully spherical LCD monitor on your desk? This puppy uses a 500 RPM spinning LCD line to show equirectangular panoramas. Resolution isn't stellar, but the design with the outer glossy glass ball is so gorgeous!

More info about this device on this blog.

Project Dragonfly

This looked interesting for all you home inventors. Apparently Microsoft Reseach is involved in the development of a hardware sandboxing platform. Similar to the popular Arduino platform, but with much fancier modules - amoung them a touchscreen and a Wi-Fi radio.

Strangely enough, there's zero info about this on the web. Does it even exist? Was it a dream? All I have left is this flyer.

Robot Attack!

It wouldn't be Japan if there wouldn't be fancy robots on display. They were all behind glass at the booth of the Advanced Robotics Lab. So I really can't tell if they're just dumb puppets or self-aware killer machines. But I know for sure that their design rocks.

Eye HDR - Gaze-Adaptive display for HDR images

Here's one that better fits the topic of this blog. A professor from the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore built a system that tracks your eyeball motion, figures out what you're looking at, and adjusts the exposure of an HDR image in realtime. Nothing revolutionary on the hardware side, and probably nothing that will rival the iPad, but for sure an interesting idea.

Here is a video of my friend Alex getting a demo:

Eye HDR from Christian Bloch on Vimeo.

3D Multitouch Interface in Style

The french VR company Immervision makes this insanely cool touch-pad cube. It's so beautifully designed, and the multitouch makes it so joyfully interactive to use. You grab, spin, pich, and the 3d object / environment does what you want. Remember the first time you pinched a photo on an iPhone? This is the same wo-haaaa effect all over again, but this time in 3D on a Magic Mirror.

Let my assistant Alex show you:

Cubtile from Christian Bloch on Vimeo.

But most exciting about this trip was Tokyo itself. I shot a bazillion panoramas in a variety of traditional and futuristic places.
Check out the best of them in my newly opened Tokyo Pano Gallery.

Picturenaut goes Open Source

2010-01-14T17:58:00.000-08:00

Actually, not really.

We have something even better for you: an
Open Source Plugin SDK

It's the complete package with examples, documentation and installation guide. That will allow you to use the insane realtime multitasking power of Picturenaut for your very own tonemapping algorithms. Just check out the code example on the SDK page to learn how easy that is.

Oh, and by the way - there's also a new Picturenaut version out! Only one minor change: the tonemapping button now has a drop-down menu. That's to cope with all the fancy tonemapping methods you guys will be coding...

HDR Source offers 120 sets for Smart IBL

2010-01-07T22:46:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy to welcome HDR Source as official sIBL supporter. It's one of the oldest HDR stores on the web, with a huge library of over 120 sIBLs from a great variety of locations.

The man behind HDR Source is Charles Leo, who works in architectural visualization himself and is well known in the VRay community. Check out Lunar Studio for some breathtaking renderings! Maybe that's why his HDR libraries are so popular - because they just work.

Charles also wrote some great tutorials on setting up Smart IBL in MAX and rendering with Linear Workflow in VRay. I think that speaks volumes for his expertise.

To kick things off right, Charles friendly provided 7 promo-sIBLs for you. Very awesome!

Literally spent 30 seconds on this: I just grabbed a random object from our Eden FX asset library, and loaded up the Hotel Lookout sIBL. Rotated and moved the environment until I found a nice composition, and hit render. No adjustments to lighting or render settings, no post processing, it came out just like that... Which confirms: The lighting in the sIBL-sets from HDR Source certainly is in tune. The render may not be perfect, but clearly a great starting point.

Welcome to the future!

2010-01-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

2010.
We managed to get through the icky single-digits into the era of real science fiction. Hurray!

Let me start with a quick review of last year.

2009 has been pretty busy year in the HDR market.

• Photomatix and FDR Tools have matured a lot. Both have polished their Photoshop Plugins which has helped workflow integration.

• Picturenaut has become a real challenger to the commercial HDR packages, with its new interface and features. And thanks to your generous support it's still free.

• At least 4 new HDR programs entered the market, among them HDR Photostudio representing a real milestone.

• The Promote Control came out, the first professional remote controller to bring advanced bracketing to Canon and Nikon cameras.

That's all great. But let's rather look forward. At the chance to leaning myself way out the window, here's my...

Predictions for 2010

Dolby is likely to build an HDR display that will blow everyone away.
Nowadays every display company has at least one flagship model with Local Dimming technology. Their software is proprietary, tech specs are confusing to downright misleading, driver support to display real HDR content is non-existent. Dolby, having signed up the original inventors, will rule them all by creating the reference HDR display device. It will likely be ungodly expensive, but Dolby will license the tech out to the others, who will have to bite the bullet and obey. Because once established, consumers will look out for the Dolby Vision Logo sticker.

Microsoft will push hard on JPEG XR.
This highly flexible HDR format, formerly known as WDP or HD Photo, has real potential to become the workhorse of consumer-friendly HDR hardware. I imagine it to become a third option in cameras. The dynamic range of a RAW file, but the size and simplicity of a JPEG file. Sounds like the best of both worlds, doesn't it? And since the JPEG comite approved JPEG XR as official standard, there's no license restrictions. Hardware vendors just need an incentive to use it. As Windows 7 with full JPEG XR support gains more ground in 2010, all it takes is user demand and one daring underdog to jump ahead to unleash an avalanche of JPEG XR capable cameras.

Of course, these predictions are based on pure speculations. I'm curious myself if they actually turn into realities.

But I'm absolutely sure about my....

Plans for 2010

Steve Chapman is joining the HDRLabs family, contributing one of the most exciting projects to date. His infamous PanoCamera is going Open Source, a truly universal DSLR remote controller for handheld platforms. We're feverishly working on the documentation right now, so watch this space in January!

Smart IBL will continue to grow, on the software support side as well as the available content. Charles Leo from HDR Source has just joined the ranks of sIBL set vendors, expect some really awesome sample sets in the near future. Here's a taste of his 120+ sets...

And most importantly, I will be working on the second edition of the HDRI Handbook. It will probably take me all year, and it will be a very comprehensive update.

Happy New Year to all of you,
and Happy Shooting / Stitching / Rendering in 2010!

Christian Bloch

December Shortcuts

2009-12-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

A bunch of news have accumulated over the past weeks. Each one deserves a full article, but I'm lacking the time right now. Before they slip out of my mind, here are the quickies:

2009 HDR All-Stars

Shortlist of the hottest new cameras by Jack Howard. Sitting right at the source, Jack gets his HDR-savvy hands on pretty much every new model. Great read. Very tempting to forward this list to Santa Claus.

HDR Darkroom 1.0

Yet another HDR software is out. The feature set is pretty solid for a version 1, albeit I wouldn't call it revolutionary. Very slick workflow-oriented interface, RAW import, 2 image alignment methods, 2 Local and 1 Global Tonemapper. No sign of 360 panorama compensation, and it can't save in EXR format (although it can load it just fine). Haven't run it through all its paces yet, but HDR Darkroom might be something to keep an eye on.

HDR Thumbnail Browser: Bracket

Managing HDR files used to be the biggest workflow gap ever. Lightroom ignores everything HDR, XNView and Adobe Bridge support some formats but have poor display capabilities. To the rescue comes Bracket. Shows about every flavor of HDR imagery, properly gamma-adjusted so you can actually see something, on PC, Mac and Linux. On top of that it's free, hence highly recommended download!

Photomatix Tonemapping PS Plugin v2.0 beta

Has caught up feature-wise with the standalone version, and is even available in 64-bit. I use it now regularly, and it looks very awesome. (Note: Make sure to flatten the image before running this plugin!)

SpheroCam HDR wins Award

Gerhard Bonnet received the Robert-Luther-Award from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh) for changing the game with his SperoCamHDR. Conratulations, Gerhard!

Monthly Site Updates

As you've come to expect, there is a brand new sIBL-of-the-month out, this time from beautiful Barcelona. The Hot-on-Flickr gallery now finds the most interesting December submissions, and looks better than ever. I sweetened the lightbox style and added a slideshow feature.
Most revolutionary are the feature additions in the Community Forum: Attaching images automatically generates zoomable thumbnails, and putting the URL to an equirectangular pano in-between [pano] [/pano] tags will automatically embed the krpano viewer in your message. Pretty slick, huh?

Advanced HDR techniques in Photoshop with Jack Howard

2009-11-23T22:24:00.000-08:00

You think Photoshop is weak when it comes to HDR?
Think again.

Jack Howard, fellow RockyNook author and Director of New/Social Media at Adorama, is here to prove you wrong by demonstrating some really cool Photoshop HDR tricks. It's all about getting creative with workarounds.

You may want to watch part 1 first, or just press play below to skip to the really good stuff.

Very inspiring, thanks Jack! Another favorite of mine is tweaking the mask of an exposure adjustment layer with the gradient tool and soft brush strokes. Makes some really smooth "invisible" effects. You know, the kind that only gets the image where I want it without looking processed.
In fact, these are the techniques I rely on when tonemapping these extremely big shots of David Breashears. Just finished another piece:

David Breashears' Karakoram B in 520 Megapixel

Site update:

Long-time members of the HDRI Community forum will recognize the new look, now better matching the site theme. There are also new features: Facebook integration, a Spell Checker, and many more.

Blochi

Saving the world, one gigapano at a time

2009-11-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

The glaciers are melting, that's a sad fact of life.

I'm no big environmentalist, and this won't be one of these "Call to Action" posts. It never occured to me that I could make a difference. I mean, yes, my ride is a scooter with 80 miles/gallon, but that's just because I love my Vespa and I got sick of finding parking in LA ;)

And then there's people like David Breashears. A passionate Mout Everest climber, who made it his lifetime goal to educate people about the climate problem. He's matching famous photographs from a hundred years ago, and it's pretty scary how much the "water towers of the world" have dried out in this time. Check out this video clip:

It's called the Glacial Research Imaging Project (GRIP). You might have seen the New York Times Ad on Synday, on the back cover. More info about GRIP is here and here.

After seeing my 2.5 GPixel Grand Canyon pano, David went back up the mountain to reshoot these pictures in HDR and in really really high resolution. He came to me for some shooting advice. After several phone calls I sort of joined the project, doing the merging, stitching and tonemapping.
An interesting challenge. But well worth the effort, especially when the result turns out like this:

David Breashears' Karakoram in 770 Megapixel

You'll get the full explanation to the glacier after Mr. Breashears is back from the mountain, did his round with the scientists, and gets his own website up. I'm just in it for the post processing.

To my knowledge nobody has done an HDR image this big before.

Here's what I learned during the process:

Photoshop CS4 is the only app that can load and tonemap an EXR file of 6 GB.
AutoPano Giga can make such a file, but it needs to be on LInear Blending, no Color Correction, and no Compression.
That's why Vignetting needs to be removed during RAW development (Lightroom here).
SmartBlend works on PC, but not on Mac. Although it still tends to generate blending artifacts in HDR mode.
PTGui on the other hand, works great at this size with standard PTGui blending.
The 64-bit version of CS4 is pretty responsive in the viewport, but every operation (load/save/sharpen/flatten) takes ages. Consdering the image eats up 10 GB of RAM, only my VFX workstation at work can actually do this.
Tonemapping snow is hard. Somehow it always turns out grey. Figured out that this is just a mental thing: there is no upper point of reference. So there is nothing stopping me from overdoing the local contrasts, effectively working against the overall global contrast and darkening the snow patches.
TIFF files can't be bigger than 4 GB.
PSB is the only file format that really works. Can bloat up to > 17 GB, when tonemapping manually with adjustment layers.
Photomatix 64-bit, made for tonemapping huge images, needs to support PSB. At least the single layer, flattened PSB - otherwise it's kind of pointless.
Gigapanos are strange. Tonemapping them to look good in every zoom level, all the way out and when focussing on a tiny detail - very hard.

Why did I go full HDR on this?

Using a local tonemapper on the tiles before stitching was my first idea. But that leads to a huge variation in overall brightness. Especially the clear sky tiles turn into a mess, because noise/grain is the only detail emphasized here.

On the other hand, all the snow and ice do show a very high dynamic range. A combined field of view of 320 degree makes it even worse. Compare the result with the Best Exposure Preview stitch, and you'll see that the HDR treatment does make a hell lot of sense. Although, in comparison, that preview stitch was ridicuously easy done in Autopano Giga on MacbookPro.

While my involvement probably won't stop the glaciers, it's nice to gather some Karma points while tackling an interesting HDR challenge like this.

How to increase the Canon 7D's Dynamic Range

2009-11-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

Despite the title, this video only has a remote connection to HDR.
It's still worth watching, especially for all you Canon-heads out there...

How to increase the Canon 7D dynamic range (Tutorial) from Luka on Vimeo.

Some remarks:

If you want to give this a shot, hop over to Luka's Vimeo page for the download links.

Although this is all just a hack, it's a very effective one (as Luka's examples show). I'm actually surprised such an aggressive grading doesn't cause more visible banding and posterization artifacts. Because after all, the recording medium - a movie file - is still compressed in 8 bits only! Even though the captured dynamic range is increased, it still has to go through the low dynamic range bottle neck that is the movie file format. Just that instead of selecting an exposure window, the custom picture style is compressing the dynamic range.

Now, if cameras would support HDR-Video formats like XDepth or HDR-MPEG, it could be done right. They would be capable to retain every bit the sensor captured, enabling grading with a similar quality you're expecting from RAW image editing. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

Site updates:

I have switched the commenting system over to Disqus. What I used previously, Haloscan, was so outdated that the company I signed up for it doesn't even exist anymore... The good thing is, that Disqus is a much nicer system with all the bells and whistles (like facebook and twitter connectivity), but the downside is that I couldn't figure out yet how to migrate all the previous comments. Which is a shame, really, some of them were really good and informative.

Upgrade complete: HDRLabs v1.5

2009-11-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

Phuu... Finally.
This was the first complete overhaul of the entire website. Everything works again, better than ever before. What you see now is what I intended the original design to be.

Most notable updates:

Kirt Witte shares more tips and tricks in his HDRI FAQ.

For example, did you know that you you can save post-processing time on your panoramas, when you line up the tripod legs? Later, you will only have to retouch 2 shadows for the nadir, and not 3...

Kirt's HDRI FAQ is not only bigger now, but also more accessible. You can link to any of the answers directly (like I just did with the image above), and there's RSS feeds and a search function in the side bar.

The second-best thing that happened to this website was the

Flash Panorama Gallery.

What was previously just one long page, is now divided in sections. Less messy. Better. Also highlights the best panos on the first page. Whenever a pano is available as sIBL set, you will see a download link appear. Like, on this sIBL-of-the-month. Nice cross-linking, eh? Browsing is a much nicer experience than just grabbing it from the archive - which I've also updated, by the way.

Other than that, you might have noticed new icons and new header images. There's also new links in the sidebar to the HDRI-Handbook translations (he, I'm published in Korean). New sitemap and new embedded search function. New everything.

Happy Halloween!
Christian Bloch

Silence?

2009-10-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

If this blog has become too quiet, then that's because the entire site is currently under heavy construction.

I wasn't planning for this. It just happened that updating to OS X Snow Leopard caused a chain reaction, breaking my website generator first, then some important plugins, and ultimately this website. Along the way I realized that the whole site requires some serious house cleaning. First victim was the German language version. Sorry "Freunde". As soon as I find a way to update German along with the English pages, I'll bring it back.

My apologies to everyone I promised a review or featurette here. Don't worry, it's going to happen, once I get this rocking boat back under control.

In the meantime, why don't you check out a new panorama: Downtown LA at Golden Hour, made from 224 exposures, resulting in a massive 18.000 x 9.000 full 360 degree EXR pano. I used the Promote Control for shooting this piece. Which, by the way, is heavily discussed by some of the most profilic pano pros with the Promote developer Arty in this thread. Great to see Arty take suggestions and ideas serious, amoung them user interface improvements, a pocket to mount on the tripod, and a back scratcher.

PS: Even when things are under construction, I still snuck in a new sIBL-of-the-month.
You didn't think I let you down, did you?

Christian Bloch

Highlights from the HDR Symposium

2009-09-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

Stanford's HDR Symposium turned out to be very interesting event. The collective brainpower of a small nation, crammed into a single room - you bet the air was sizzling from ideas and strong opinions.

Here's a quick recap of some selected points of interest:

Marc Levoy explained how the Camera 2.0 project will enable a community-driven approach to push computational photography forward. Key element is the departure from "black box" firmware, in favor of a fully scriptable open-source platform.
Levoy further recommends Animal Eyes as reference book for everyone building capturing devices.

Helge Seetzen from Dolby Labs shared some interesting insights on the difficulties of driving Local Dimming hardware. He called color LEDs "little buggers" for being notoriously inconsistent in color. But exploiting their flaws rather than fighting them leads ultimately to an even better display. For example, spectral leakage turns into an advantage when driving 6 instead of 3 primary colors, resulting in a much wider gamut.

Jack Tumblin lets us rethink what we consider a "great image", and explains how current tonemapping methods might be missing the point. He honored Renaissance artists like Rembrandt as excellent tonemappers, using artistic liberty to cheat the lighting to create more evolving images.
Tumblin recognizes the "evocative HDR Look" for inducing an emotional response, but the result is often achieved by muddling through. In this regard he proposes a tonemapping approach, that looks beyond the pixels on the screen, and rather makes a distinction between surface colors, reflection, and lighting. This would allow more controlled look-finding. For example, you could tweak just the lighting in a photo, without worrying about side effects like "dirty" or "super-glossy".

James Ferwerda is hitting the same vein by proposing an extension of the La*b* color space with variables describing the glossiness of a material: c* for contrast gloss and d* for distinctness-of-image.
In a perfect execution of the scientific method he did a field study where participants rated the gloss impression of a rendered ball, which resulted in a psychovisual gloss model. Although originally geared towards CG imaging, this model could be interesting when applied to photography in general. Also, Ferwerda dropped a new wording that I find very appropriate: High-Fidelity Imaging. Yay.

There was a lot more going on, and I will most certainly get into detail in later posts. HDRI is a pretty wide field, and this HDR Symposioum surely succeeded in bringing the top guns from adjacent fields together. Kudos to Joyce Farrell for flawlessly organizing this remarkable event.

Just one question remains unanswered:
Who owns tonemapping? The camera, the photo software, or the display device?

Stanford's Frankencamera

2009-09-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

In preparation of the upcoming HDR Symposium here's one of the hottest topics:

I hope this project takes off, because we're all sick of the big camera makers ignoring HDR photograper's needs. How can it be, that the new Canon 7D is still crippled to 3-frame-AEB? Seriously, an open system without API restrictions is our last hope to push things forward.

Read the article on Stanford News, then dive into the project page.

Picturenaut 3.0 released

2009-09-03T00:53:00.000-07:00

I'm just reading a book on webdesign, and that told me I should get to the point:

Picturenaut 3 rocks!

Our very own HDR program is up for a major revision:

New interface (that I helped design)
Local Tonemapper
RAW support
Plugin-SDK
And more

Full feature list and download here.

NOTE: Picturenaut is still donationware.

You decide how much it's worth to you. Marc Mehl, the lone programmer, has put a lot of passion into making Picturenaut so awesome. Please show some balls and buy Marc a beer ($5), a movie ticket ($10) or a dinner ($20). It's easy to be grateful.

Other things worth mentioning

There's a brand new sIBL-of-the-month, just shot it a month ago on my home vacation. I snuck into the ruins of an old factory, a very Piranesi-esque environment of decay and nature reclaiming the place. Check out the High-Res Panoview here.

Also, the battle for front seats in the Hot-on-Flickr gallery is on again. Wonder if we'll see some Picturenaut submissions this month...

All sorts of things that happened lately

2009-08-26T16:54:00.000-07:00

I'm back from vacation, a terrible cold, and working on several other great things (to be announced soon). How much newsworthy stuff can possibly come together in three weeks?
Apparently, a lot!

Spheron strikes back with an HDR Video Camera

Spheron reclaims the pole position in HDR high-tech equipment by premiering a full blown HDR video camera at Siggraph.

Here are the main specs:

- HDR video capture
- 20 f-stops of dynamic range
- full HD resolution 1920 x1080
- 24 and 30 fps, possibly up to 60 fps
- saves to fiber coupled storage server
- records 5 hours of EXR frame sequences

Well, they almost premiered it - read the full story at fxguide! It's still a work-in-progress, according an eyewitness it still has the size and weight of a small refrigerator. Nevertheless a huge leap forward, redirecting the industry into a most appreciated direction.

If my recent post about the Civetta sounded slightly disapproving of Spheron, that was unintentional. After all, that's like comparing BMW and Mercedes... In all fairness, it shouldn't go unmentioned that Spheron has also updated their core product:

The infamous SpheroCam HDR.

Hardware-wise the SpheroCam HDR comes now tethered to a Panasonic Toughbook with touchscreen interface, mounted right on the tripod. But the most R&D went into the software that runs the system: It now comes in an Easy and a Pro variant. Easy is the One-Touch solution for all those police investigators out there, Pro for everyone who know what their doing. And that Pro version really does sound awesome:

EXR-capable panorama viewer, hardware accelerated
Marker-based set measurements from two EXR panos
Export of 3d marker data as locators for AutoDesk Maya

Read all about Spheron's new software here.

Try the 360 Precision Adjuste MKII panorama head for free

360 Precision launched a demo program, that's as unique as ingenious.
You just put your name on a waiting list, and after a while you get their latest top-of-the-line Adjuste MKII panohead in the mail. Keep it for 10 days, shoot panos until your shutter rings, and then you send it off to the next guy on the list. That is, if their Adjuste head is just half as good as all the reviews report (here and here), you will most certainly want to keep it...

If you're ready to get spoiled by a $1000 panorama head, sign up here.

New cameras: Ricoh GR Digital III and Canon PowerShot G11

I find it interesting how Dynamic Range has become an important feature for camera makers, even in the compact class. Dare to say I told you so. They're finally focussing on making snapshots better, not just bigger!

Ricoh keeps throwing in the DR Double Shot mode, first seen in the Ricoh CX1 (blogged about it in March). According to specs it extends the range to 12 EVs, which is what you could previously only expect from a RAW shot on a DSLR. There's a good review of the new Ricoh GR Digital III on the Photography Blog, and some great test shots on dpreview.com. Couldn't find any review mentioning if the DR Double Shot mode is still limited to JPEG output... so they might also do it in RAW by now??

Canon even went a further in their dedication to Dynamic Range. Updating the hugely successful PowerShot G10 to G11, they even sacrificed 4 MP of resolution in favor of a 2 stop DR increase. No reviewer could confirm this yet, for now we only have Canon's announcement talking about putting image quality first. Sure sounds great to me...

New HDR software: HDR Darkroom

We also have a new player entering the game: HDR Darkroom. It claims have a superior tonemapper: faster, better, more user friendly. You know, the usual claims. How much of that is true you can find out yourself. Get the first public Beta version.

Sorry for the long post, thanks to everyone sending me emails or posting hints in the forum. I'll try to react faster next time and chop news up in more bite-sized pieces.

Until then,
Happy Shooting!

HDR Symposium coming closer

2009-08-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

Siggraph is coming up, but I won't go this time. Still, I'll try to catch some news from what appears on the web. If you're going to New Orleans, make sure to get a first glimpse at the Civetta in Hall G, Booth No. 3331!

Instead, me and Kirt Witte got approved to do an "HDRI for Artists" class at Siggraph Asia. Domo arigato, Yokohama, we're coming!

Also, I will definitely be at the HDR Symposium at Stanford next month. And so will fellow HDR photo-blogger Uwe Steinmüller from www.OutbackPhoto.com and numerous decision makers in the emerging HDR industry. The conference program just got published, and it looks incredibly interesting. I really think this will be a historic event! If you haven't signed up yet - you have two weeks left before late fees apply. So hurry up!

... and then there's the

Monthly Site Update

Right on time I prepared a new sIBL-of-the-month for you, and restarted the Hot-on-Flickr gallery.

Happy August,
Christian

Civetta challenges the Spheron Camera

2009-07-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

The infamous SpheroCam HDR used to be the ultimate High-End HDR panocam. Not anymore.

Civetta is the name of this new toy by Dr. Marcus Weiss, who coincidentally also was a co-founder of Spheron. Now he's doing his own thing, and his new camera system seems to be a real winner.

What's different?

The SpherCamHDR uses a single-line CDD in a constant revolution, scanning the full environment as it turns. Especially in low-light situations, that can take a long time, and it's even slower when you max out capture resolution (because it has to turn slower).
The Civetta is built on Canon technology, and snaps fullframe pictures with a 15mm fisheye. That makes it more of a traditional panobot, with all the speed and resolution advantages. If you had the patience and real skills in lathing and milling, you could build such a panobot yourself. Except, it wouldn't look as slick, and it wouldn't be as easy to use.

One-Button-Solution

That's where the similarities to the SpheroCamHDR come in. They are both monkey-proof; operation is stripped down to a single push-button. Apparently, that's what it takes to be applicable for crime scene investigation. Police officers don't like to be bothered with settings and stuff. One button, preferably a blinking one.
Both camera systems come with their own software suite that allows measuring distances in the final image, provided you took two HDRI's with a known distance. Although I must admit that the Civetta software suite doesn't look as sophisticated as the Spheron pendant (yet), and the final HDR pano will always be in TIFF32 format (that's 1.2 GB for 14144 x 7072 pixel capture).

Bottom line:

Civetta is faster, cheaper, higher resolution.
Whereas cheaper is relative, it's still 28.600 Euro. But hey - we're talking High-End here...

Photomatix 3.2 and Tonemapping rants

2009-07-21T00:34:00.000-07:00

Photomatix keeps the lead as the most popular tonemapper out there. And for a good reason - the folks at HDRSoft constantly listen to the user base, and keep delivering free updates.

What's new in version 3.2?

For a minor version jump from 3.1 to 3.2, there is more than you might expect.

Light Smoothing is now a regular slider, instead only a 5-step setting. That's especially awesome, because it is the most critical setting in the Photomatix - Smoothing is what swings your image between natural and artistic look. And now you're in full control over that. If you felt completely comfortable with only 5 steps, you can revert back to the old style by checking the "Light" box underneath.

Tool tips are now shown at the bottom of the tonemapping panel. They have also been rewritten, and they are actually quite useful. Now Photomatix basically explains itself!

My favorite is the 360° option, that has been repaired to treat the zenith properly. Before, fully spherical panoramas would get an ugly pinching spot at the Zenith. I tried it in 3.2, and I can officially declare Photomatix now pano-safe. But watch out - that option is now tucked away in the Miscellaneous section, so go dig for it.

Other improvements are

better multithreading
more supported RAW formats
floating histogram with RGB channel views
batch processing detects bracketing sets by itself
built-in tonemapping presets (which turn out to be great starting points)

Kudos to HDRShoft and thanks!
Grab your update here. If you don't own it yet, remember that the HDRI Handbook is your ticket to claim a 30% rebate! (saves you $30, so you basically get your book money back. You could use it buy another book for a friend, hehe)

next topic of the day:

Tonemapping Controversy

Even though I might not follow each photo forum thread on the web, there seem to be heated discussions about natural vs. artistic tonemapping. Purists even go as far as bashing on Photomatix in particular, which is about as ridiculous as blaming a hammer for a crooked nail. People make images, not software, and as an artist I find that making the software responsible for the look of an image is a personal insult. Talk like that degrades me from an artist to a button pusher.

And don't bash on the "HDR Look" either. Please. It only makes you appear narrow-minded and unable to see the big picture of what HDR really stands for. Scott Bourne wrote an excellent column about the issue at hand, and so did Robert Fisher and Darwin Wigget. All great photographers, with an amazing portfolio, that know what they're talking about. My personal perspective is that of an VFX artist, and honestly I find this discussion quite amusing. Want to know what I think?

HDR is growing up.

More specifically, HDR Imaging is graduating from High School to College. It now has to stand up to established photo techniques, and while the "Rebel Appeal" was able to get him chicks in High School, it will now have to show a more serious side. That's where it becomes professional.

Indeed, there are serious advantages in HDR: technical quality of the image data, and how far you can tweak an image before it breaks up in technical terms. That's a fact. DOT Editions for example, is a pro retouch house, is pulling some great stunts with relighting. Also, when people experiment with looks that they couldn't do before, then that's a good thing. It enriches our culture. We're just now figuring out how and why images are breaking up in visual terms. That's new. And I have even seen how going to the extremes, consciously overcooking, can create beautiful pieces or art. Luke Kaven's portraits of Jazz Musicians are my favorite examples.

That's my 2 cents.

PS: Just noticed that I forgot to update the sIBL-of-the-Month page. Literally forgot, threw it in the archive right away. Jeez. Especially when it's such a good one, a real movie location, showing off the new multiple light source feature in Smart IBL. Download here or Panoview here. And here's test render:

Smart IBL v2.0 is better and bigger than ever!

2009-07-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

[Rollover the image to see raw render output, lit with Smart IBL in Lightwave.]

Whenever this blog is quiet for a month, you can be sure we have something cooking:

Smart IBL 2.0 is the first major revision to our open source HDRI Lighting Kit. We updated the format itself, all scripts and programs, even the documentation. Everybody on the project was working really hard on it, including myself, Kel Solaar, Chris Huf, Christian Bauer, and Volker Heisterberg. And we're really proud of how it turned out.

What's new?

Smart IBL 2.0 in Lightwave.

GPS tags: Choose your lighting set by region!
Standalone GUI: Is your 3d app's scripting language limited? Fear not, there is hope. Kel Solaar's amazing sIBL_GUI connects to Maya, XSI, 3ds MAX. Flawlessly.
Multiple Lights: Obviously better.
Automatic Update: Latest bug fixes and features delivered to your door (LW loader and sIBL_GUI only).
More new tags to build stronger and more accurate lighting setups: North direction, shooting height, date and time.

How to update

In Maya and 3dsMAX you have two options: Download the latest Loader Scripts or use the standalone sIBL_GUI.

XSI works only with sIBL_GUI, so get that.

Lightwave is the opposite of XSI, here you need the latest Loader Script.

modo 401 comes with a built-in environment preset system. Gwynne wrote a sIBL to Environment Preset converter just to do that.

The new sIBL-Edit is for everyone.

sIBL-Edit makes full use of the 2.0 format.

Keep checking back for updates, Chris Huf is still squashing some minor bugs. That's just because he went all out (again) with additional features. For example, you can geotag your personal sIBL-collection by placing markers in Google Earth, export them as KML file, and load it into sIBL-Edit. Or how about printing a contact sheet with thumbs and descriptions of all your sIBL-sets? And not to forget: powerful keyword search-as-you-type. Way to go, Chris!

By the way - Chris is currently available. So, if you're thinking about tightening up your VFX pipeline before the next wave of big features hits, shoot Chris an email.

Important:

You also have to update your current sIBL-Collection. Old sets will still work, but you will miss out on the best new features.
Almost every set in the sIBL Archive has been updated. To spare you [and my server] downloading more than 500 MB again, follow these steps closely:

Download the .ibl update package here. These are just the description files, the images haven't changed.
Place each .ibl file in the matching sIBL-set folder. Just overwrite the old ones.
Enjoy.

Dutch Skies 360 Promo

The cherry on top is delivered by Bob Groothuis. He's a master pano photographer from the Netherlands, a true HDR expert with field experience in VFX shoots.

Bob's Dutch Skies 360° collection is officially the first Smart IBL shop on the web. Each set is put together with much care, fully sIBL 2.0 compliant and loaded with bonus material. They're all gorgeous, tested, ready-to-go.

And because Bob is so awesome, he donated these seven sets for our free archive:

Symposium and Workshop on HDR Imaging at Stanford

2009-06-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

Where is HDRI heading?
Why is it so hard to build HDR cameras?
What is Dolby Vision up to, and where is the competition?
How much better will real HDR displays look, and how is this put into numbers?
What's the state-of-the-art in tonemapping, and will we need it in the future?

Leading experts will discuss all these questions at the HDRI Symposium and Workshop.

I hereby declare attendance mandatory for every HDR software maker!
For everyone else, it's still highly recommended. Cancel any plans for September 10-11 and sign up for the HDR Symposium instead. Seriously. All the original founding fathers will be there, plus the makers and shakers of tomorrow.

HDR PhotoStudio sets a new standard for HDR editing

2009-06-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

We've seen a bunch of new HDR programs lately, most of them very similar in the general approach: You merge an HDR, you tonemap, you do your fine adjustments in 8 or 16 bit, and then you save your final image.

Unified Color's HDR PhotoStudio breaks this workflow paradigm, and I love them for that!

So, what does HDR PhotoStudio do differently?

Slick dark production interface of HDR Photostudio.

Very simple: The image is kept in 32-bit floating point at all times. Instead of one Monster-Tonemapping window, you get a full shelf of tools to tweak an image until your eyes are bleeding. You'd use the Shadow/Highlight tool to recover blown out areas, then use the Local Contrast tool to give it some punch, correct the White Balance, or selectively finetune some colors. One tool after the other. Each time you're working on the full image, you see exactly what you get, and you're still in 32 bit. Tonemapping can be that simple!

Waaaaait a minute ... isn't my monitor just 8 bit? How can this possibly be WYSIWYG when the image is kept in 32 bit?

Exactly. That is the fresh approach of this program! What you see on your 8 bit monitor is what you will get when you save it in an 8-bit format like JPG. There's absolutely no need to break the image down to 8 bit anytime before it's saved. See, your monitor doesn't have 4000 by 3000 pixels either, yet you can still edit your 12 Megapixel image. That's what the Zoom slider is for. The same way you can edit an image with high dynamic range on a low dynamic range device. That's what the Viewing Exposure slider is for (called Display Brightness here). Same thing, really.

In a way, this approach is actually more conservative than revolutionary, it's just as you would expect from a regular image editor. You load your image, you apply your tools, one after another. Until your like it. Back to old school, I'd say!

Tonemapping Quality

Here is a little quality evaluation on the infamous KitchenWindow.exr from my book DVD. If you tried tonemapping this yourself before, you will have noticed that this image has such a high contrast that it quickly turns into halo-hell.

Except for the bad quality of my animated GIF, this clearly confirms that HDR PhotoStudio isn't only very effective in suppressing halos, it's also very good in preserving a natural look.

Serious HDR Editing

White Balance with a color wheel, wrapped in an intuitive professional interface.

What's really great about this new/old approach, is that you don't have to save in 8-bit. Whatever you did, you can still save your image in 32-bit. That opens a whole new world of usefulness, way beyond tonemapping as we knew it.
If you're preparing HDRIs for 3D lighting, texture, or matte painting, HDR Photostudio is actually outperforming Photoshop CS4 when it comes to White Balance, Color Adjustments and Noise Reduction. Seriously. Because Photoshop can't do any of this in 32-bit mode. Of course, Photoshop Extended still has HDR Layers and Brushes, so you couldn't entirely drop it either...

Now, this is the part where I was about to insert my standard rant about missing EXR support. But, thankfully, the programmer was listening and in the next version (coming soon) you can in fact save OpenEXR images. Currently available options are TIFF32 (wastefully big), and their own proprietary / highly compressed BEF format. The program comes with a BEF plugin for Photoshop, which is a nice touch, but ultimately only a standard format fits in everyone's pipeline.

Bottom line

You've rarely ever seen me wave the fanboy flag like this. But if you're serious about HDR editing, you need HDR PhotoStudio. Period.
Sure, it needs plenty of resources, but that's reasonable for full 32-bit editing. Currently, it doesn't work well with large images (>25 Megapixels), but as soon as I complained about this, head programmer Igor threw together a 64-bit version that solves that issue. So, extra points for listening to the user base.
There's no Mac version (yet), so that's bad. But that's about it.

As you've come to expect, the HDRI Handbook is your VIP ticket for getting a 30% discount. For you, my friend, that's $99.99 instead of $149.99. What a deal!

...and then, there was the

Montly update

The sibl-of-the-month is a scenic dirt road in Monument Valley (panoview here), especially for all you 3D car fans out there. We're currently in the process of updating the Smart IBL project to the next level, so if you're feeling adventurous today join the beta force in the forum. You've been warned!

New Pentax K-7: The first HDR camera?

2009-05-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

The answer to the question is: Yes and No.

Pentax just announced the new K-7, and the feature highlight is in-camera HDR shooting and tonemapping. It's truthful in both, meaning it really does shoot several exposures to cover whopping 17 EVs, and the onboard tonemapping renders very natural images. That is the "Yes" part of the answer.

The pity is, that both features are connected: The real 32-bit HDR image is inaccessible, the tonemapping result is all you get (in JPEG format). Love it or leave it!

Here's why I don't like this:

A) Tonemapping is the fun part in HDR photography. I appreciate in-camera merging of the exposures, but please leave the creative part to me!

B) It renders this mode useless for 32-bit applications of HDR, like 3D-lighting, advanced compositing, lighting analysis.

C) The term HDR is further watered down, reduced to tonemapped JPEGs. This is especially concerning to me, because it works against the overall goal of having a fully HDR-capable imaging pipeline (that ends up on a Dolby-HDR enabled display).

Please, Pentax make this camera a little less smart! Why disable RAW shooting when in HDR mode? No need to make up your own 32-bit file format, just save the merged HDR images as EXR files (before tonemapping)! And in an instant you made this camera 100% more professional.

With this in mind, jump over to Adorama to read fellow HDR buff Jack Howard's hands-on review. Jack seems a bit more ecstatic about the K-7 than me, maybe because he got such excellent results out of it. Looking at his slideshow, there is no doubt that this camera is a giant leap. Just not quite the right direction for me...

Further reference:
12-page Preview on DPReview
Official Pentax K-7 site