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

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

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

Andrew

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

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, I had not. Thank you very much for that. I now own Lightroom 5.2.

Andrew

I downloaded the trial version of Lightroom 5.2 today and worked my way through the first "Learn Lightroom 5" tutorial on Youtube with one of my own images. Without much effort, I produced a better result than previously with the same image in PSE8. In particular, Lightroom did a much better job of CA correction than PT Lens had in Elements.

Score so far: Lightroom 1 Elements 0

I can feel my wallet twitching.

Andrew

Thanks for that.

PSE has only limited functionality for 16 bit images, so I guess I would only want to export to PSD or TIFF for editing in PSE if I absolutely had to - as the files are more than 5 times the size of the original DNG.

Doing all the RAW edits non-destructively in Lightroom and only exporting to a final JPEG intended for print has some attractions.

Andrew

For PSE8, I already have plug-ins or actions for curves, channel mixer, layer masks (all Grant's Tools), perspective correction, lens correction, CA correction (all PTLens), noise reduction (Colormancer).

Other than for the improved "Refine Edge" function for complex selections, is there any "must have" stuff in Elements 11? Is 16bit image editing still as limited as in PSE8 (Magic Wand, Selection Brush, Healing Brush, Clone and others, only available for 8 bit images)? Are layers (without cheating) still only available for 8 bit images?


Andrew

At the moment, I use mostly PSE8 photo editing and am quite happy doing that. I am, though, considering buying Lightroom 5.x mainly because folks keep telling me that they use it for all their photo editing, so being a sheep maybe I should consider using it for mine.

A couple of questions for those who use Lightroom (esp with Elements) .......

1) Although I am not into compositing as a rule, I do want to keep the option to do stuff like swapping in a new sky. Can I successfully use PSE8 as an external editor with Lightroom or do I really need a later version (if so, why)? Does it work well? When Lightroom fires up an external editor, will it be a 16bit or 8bit image that is passed to PSE? Are there any "gotchas" I need to know about?

2) I use DSCL to produce 16"x12" (usually) prints for camera club competitions. Before saving a JEPG to upload to DSCL, I convert the output profile to suit DSCL's printers and the paper/ink they use. I do this in Rawtherapee, because PSE will only do the conversion when printing to a local printer. I know it's only a few key presses in CS6, but it's way too expensive to buy just for that reason - will Lightroom do output profile conversions and allow a JPEG to be saved with a custom profile?

Andrew