No. I don't think it matters whether a 12MP camera would have better IQ - they wouldn't sell (m)any.

Andrew

These are 100% crops from the full size images that were used to export the JPEGs posted earlier. You said that you could see "very desirable extra detail in the clouds" - so where is it?




The version on the right is from the "darkest" DNG.

Andrew

I have examined the full resolution images in Lightroom at 100% and can see little or no difference between the cloud detail in the "darker" and "darkest" images.

Can you post crops from the areas of the two images, side by side so that I can see what you see?

Andrew

Nigel, I have emailed you a fullsize JPEG from the "darkest" DNG. I hope you find it interesting/useful.

I don't claim that it is the best possible result from that DNG using Lightroom - but it is close to the best that I can achieve in less than 5 minutes.

Andrew

On my monitor, the "darker" and "darkest" versions that I posted above are visually almost identical. Any slight tonal differences are down to me and not the source DNG or software used.

I did follow on this morning and generate a merged version using the LR/Enfuse plugin in Lightroom - but the results are so similar to those from single DNG sources that it's hardly worth posting. It is, though, impressive (to me) that LR/Enfuse could blend the source images with no noticeable degradation.

My conclusions remain the same. If you get a useable RAW with (relatively) unclipped highlights, then taking several images and using HDR software to merge them is unlikely to improve the result compared with optimally processing that single RAW. I can imagine circumstances where that might not be true - but for the images in this thread, I think it is.

As far as the image itself is concerned, I think it suffers from not having any obvious subject. The path in the foreground leads the eye to some rather uninteresting trees in the mid-ground. HDR does not produce a better result - but pointing the camera elsewhere might.

Andrew

Tut tut ......... those are the SAME images!!



Nice try ........

Andrew

Just for fun, I also processed the "darker" DNG (the DNG with over 200k pixels clipped in the highlights) in Lightroom and got this result:




Adobe Camera Raw does some tricky processing with clipped pixels to model reasonable values for clipped pixels (in green and blue) from unclipped values in other colour channels (red in this case).

It works pretty well, I think. The two images are quite hard to tell apart.

Andrew

No, we are not.

Your data is for the "darker" DNG file, whilst my comments, graphics and image are for the "darkest" DNG file.

In your stats:
Clipped pixel counts (individual channels):
Red: count = 167, first coord: 0627x0001
Green: count = 91,814, first coord: 0000x0001
Blue: count = 27,261, first coord: 0130x0000
Green_2: count = 92,289, first coord: 0001x0000

From RawDigger for the same "darker" file:
Clipped pixel counts:
Red: 216
Green: 95K
Blue: 29K
Green_2:95K

These are in quite close agreement with your figures.

If you checkout the "darkest" DNG, you'll find that there is no highlight clipping. There are about 400K clipped pixels in the shadows - but those are mainly in the mid-ground trees and are not visually obvious.

Andrew

Interesting!!

Nigel, I did receive your RAW files by email (thanks). The first thing I did was to open the "darkest" RAW in a trial copy of RawDigger. The histograms shown below refer to the RAW data not to the preview image in the RAW. As you can see, although there is around 5% clipping in the red and blue channel shadows (which may or may not be visibly obvious) there is no highlight clipping. If you can see highlight clipping in PCDU then you must be seeing the histogram for the preview image - which (I assume) is based upon the result you would get using whatever is the default processing in the camera.




I then opened the darkest image in Lightroom. The histogram in Lightroom looks like this ....




As you can see, all basic sliders are at default. A little clipping is shown in the shadows (white triangle) but none at all in the highlights. This seems to confirm RawDigger's view of the RAW data.

A few tweaks of the basic processing sliders and the addition of a grad filter to pull back the sky a bit - and I get this result - though practically, from a tonality perspective, you can have it look pretty much any way you like. Lightroom is good at that kind of stuff!!




Maybe tomorrow, I'll have a play with the LR/Enfuse plugin I have to merge the two DNG's you provided (LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plugin that does either or BOTH of HDR processing and focus stacking).

For now, my conclusion is unchanged. I see little or no benefit in using HDR for this kind of image.

Andrew

Was that histogram shown immediately on loading the RAW, in which case perhaps the histogram was for the preview image and not the RAW itself.




Again, I do not know PCDU so cannot really comment on that. Does PCDU use the camera's JPEG default processing if you do no manual processing? If so, we really don't know whether there was any clipping in the RAW.

You have a PM

Andrew