Helicon Soft Forum

Thanks in advance for any insights. This weekend a did a series of focus-stacked HDRs. My plan was to focus-stack first, then take the resulting stacks and do HDR merges. The span between the shortest and longest exposures was 4 stops.

In an older version of Helicon Soft, v4.2.8, I manually loaded the source images and the output was correctly exposed, i.e. the short exposure was clearly darker than the long exposure with the expected gradient. So, no problems there!

In HeliconSoft v6.2.2, I first manually loaded these same images (this was a 25 image focus-stack each exposed across a 7 exposure bracket = 175 files) and rendered each focus stack. The resulting files look identical!! The exposure difference disappeared!

Not believing this, I also did a split-stack batch sequence of the same exposures in v6.2.2. I got the same results - I have attached the extremes of the source files and an example of their stacked output - how did that happen? Note that this isn't just a batching problem, it even happens when I manually load the batches according to their bracketed exposures.

Am I doing something wrong, or what's going on? Thanks for your help.

Forgot to point out, the source files are .dng and the output files are .tiff because they will be further processed.

Thanks

I downloaded the latest HC version, and the output still looks identical.

OK - Now it works after I used camera raw to convert all the .dng files to .tif files. But why do I have to do that? For a large HDR/focus-stack set that means converting hundreds of files.

Well, we need you files to be completely sure, I would appreciate if you send us couple of files with different exposures.


First of all, Helicon Focus is able to process DNG files in its native color space. It is called RAW-in-DNG-out mode and you can select it in RAW development preferences. Most probably this mode is active for your files.

Secondly, please disable Brightness autoadjustment in Preferences, otherwise Helicon Focus tries to adjust brightness of the images to fit first image in the stack.


Thirdly, RAW values in DNG file could be roughly equal, even if the camera exposure is different. This may happen if you choose ISO values below it normal value (e.g. 50 or "LO").

Anyway, we would appreciate the files to check this case ourselves.