LR/Enfuse

Has anyone experience of an Open Source application called Enfuse and/or a Lightroom plugin called LR/Enfuse that purports to allow:

* Blending images of different exposures together in order to create a natural looking image with a greater dynamic range.

* Blending a series of images where the focus point is difference in order to create an image with a greater depth of field - this is a common approach when creating a macro image.

* Blending a series of images for night photography image stacking in order to create an image with a longer exposure than is possible with a single frame.

More details here ...

Andrew

No, but it looks interesting. Might try that this evening

Will you get much of an idea of how good/bad it is when the output of the trial is only 500px

I agree it looks interesting.

I intend to try it soon - but I've only just got Lightroom today so, at the moment, I have other priorities. It says on the website that LR/Enfuse is "donationware" - but there is no guidance on what a suitable donation should be.

As I understand it, LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plugin - but it will need you to download Enfuse itself, which is a command line utility.


Andrew

A suitable donation is what the user feels is appropriate. Otherwise they might as well just a price tag on it.

Precisely, so if a user wants to only trial a full version - the donation could be minimal (hence the smiley)

Andrew

Looks good, but cant get it to work in LR4

Just downloaded and this, paid a donation and had a bit of a play. These are the results of a quick 10 mins messing around:

One of three original images fed into the process (this one is one stop under exposed)



Test 1 - Photomatix Pro HDR software



Test 2 - Enfused Image (using defaults)



Test 3 - Processing the above under exposed image with LR, no HDR software



I've spent a few mins processing each of the images in LR after importing from Enfuse and Photomatix but not really spent a huge amount of time on them. Enfuse definitely produces more natural looking images and better than you could achieve than just using a single exposure. Photomatix certainly has more options to play with and you can get "more interesting' effects

Over all Enfuse (and the LR plugin) are very good and certainly worth the "donation", I paid $5 and starting to feel a little stingy now lol

Have fun

Test 3 looks the best to me. Test 1 is hideous.

Test 2 is OK, but not much different to simply using LR alone, a little pointless to use an extra plugin

Test 1 is way overdone on the HDR front, but it actually has far more detail than the other two and IMO would be the best if the effects had been applied with a lighter touch.

However, for me, none of them actually look right - they look 'plastic' and artificial.

Regards
David

"Horses for Courses" David, while the 1st image is overdone (intentionally so) I do actually quite like them. More interesting the the rather flat image that I started with Always surprising how much you can get from an underexposed RAW file though !

I had a play with your underexposed image in PSE8 - nothing complicated, just lightened the shadows, increased mid-tone contrast a bit and tweaked saturation a little.




Maybe you think it looks "rather flat". It's my guess at what it probably looked like.

It looks like Enfuse works, to some extent or other for merging images having different exposures. I'm more interested, in focus stacking, which I understand it also does. When I have some time, I'll download it and see what it will do.

Andrew

There's no difference whatsoever in the amount of detail in the shots. The dynamic range/contrast is just different. There's nothing in Test1 I can't see in test 3

The images on screen are only 800 pixels wide, so it would be a surprise if you could see any difference in the amount of detail. 100% crops of the stained glass window might be instructive.

Andrew

Does anyone use the Photomatix Lightroom Merge to 32-bit HDR plugin?