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Posted

One of those stupid stories ... went on a trip to the fantastic city of Mantova (Mantua in English) with all the gear ... except for the arca-swiss plate with which to stand the camera on the tripod that I had brought with me.  As it would have been a three-hour drive home to collect it, and another three back, I extemporised the makings of a multi-shot composite as best I could, hand held.  These are "Light.jpg" and "Postcard.jpg", both cropped to put the far shore of the lake on the lower thirds line.

And managed to get two frames that don't exactly overlap the way they ought had I been able to use the tripod.  It's hard to change your settings just by touch.

Thankfully, a live perspective has saved my image, or will have when I put the finishing touches.  

When I tried using Photo 2's stack with live perspective layers, I could change the blend mode to "Difference" and see the area that didn't overlap, but couldn't work out how to re-align all the elements after I had corrected the most obvious mis-match.  I did think about using the Blend Option control (which I am still learning; at least, I think still learning), but ended up releasing both layers from the stack and applying the live perspective distortion only to the Light layer.  Jiggling that around gave me a reasonable overlap that you can see below, and then it was easy-peasy to delete the sky and water from the overexposed Light, and apply some vibrance and saturation to the darker layer.

C&C welcome

Cheers

MM

 

Light.jpg

Postcard.jpg

Final.jpg

Posted

@MikeM481027 Perhaps this is a bit outside of what you were attempting to achieve here (or the purpose of this post), since it was focused on panoramas and getting things lined up.

Since you welcomed "C&C", I will offer the following:

To me, the buildings and land, between the water and sky, need some adjustments to brightness and/or contrast to fit into the lighting of the scene more naturally and realistically (if that's your intent). They have a bit too much of that HDR look and are a bit flat (at least to me). I made a quick selection of the land and buildings and added a Curves adjustment to just them, and also applied a little sharpening also (both using a mask). How much brightness and contrast adjustment is a matter of personal preference. 

Screenshot2024-11-11at12_57_24PM.thumb.jpg.8de9808d834fff6ce4e244bc3d63b56a.jpg

2024 MacBook Pro M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB SSD, Sequoia OS, Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher v1 & v2, Adobe CS6 Extended, LightRoom v6, Blender, InkScape, Dell 30" Monitor, Canon PRO-100 Printer, i1 Spectrophotometer, i1Publish, Wacom Intuos 4 PTK-640 graphics tablet

Posted

Thanks, yes, I am still finding my way with Photo 2... the distortion to compensate for the slight differences of camera position has been absorbing me more than the fine tonal tuning.  I'm annoyed with myself for my inability, too, to discover how one influences the stacking order in Photo 2's HDR stacking.

 

Posted
2 hours ago, MikeM481027 said:

to discover how one influences the stacking order in Photo 2's HDR stacking.

Hi Mike. I figured you were more interested in the stacking and merging than tonal issues at present. 

I don't do a ton of HDR. First, I find using RAW images with Affinity's HDR stacking isn't very good, at least my attempts so far. I prefer to use pre-processed JPGs, TIFFs or PNGs. HDR Merge equalizes all your exposures, then blends them together using the most detailed portions of each exposure, so "stacking order" is not really a consideration when using their standard HDR Merge (at least, as I understand it). If you check Tone Map in HDR Merge, you automatically go to the Tone Mapping Persona after the layers are aligned, equalized, noise reduced, etc. I generally turn Tone Mapping off initially, which allows me to look at and tweak the various layers, turn some on or off, clone, etc. Then, I can always go to the Tone Mapping Persona when I am ready. 

If you want more control over layer order, you can try New Stack, which will align your images, put them into a Stack Group, and apply an "operator" to the Group (e..g., Mean, Median, Max, Average, etc). In a New Stack Group, you can change the layer order of the layers, turn visibility on or off, change layer opacity and blend modes, play with blend ranges, delete some layers, or even drag them outside of the Group and work on them without applying an operator to the entire Group. This allows you to do more manual blending with blend ranges, etc.

2024 MacBook Pro M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB SSD, Sequoia OS, Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher v1 & v2, Adobe CS6 Extended, LightRoom v6, Blender, InkScape, Dell 30" Monitor, Canon PRO-100 Printer, i1 Spectrophotometer, i1Publish, Wacom Intuos 4 PTK-640 graphics tablet

Posted

The new stack idea had occurred to me as a (visible) alternative to new HDR stack.  I hadn't at that stage got to the stacking parameters.  Only saw them last night, and the furrows in my scalp are still bleeding.  Away on a new project for a few days, so will try and fit in some remedial reading.

So thanks, and maybe "L8R"

 

Posted

...just for fun, and because your visuals are pretty, I'll allow myself a little thought: it's difficult here to bring additional frontal lighting (lights) to the city when the sun is in the background, backlit. Your final visual displays a city that is far too pale when the shadows should be more pronounced.
The idea is perhaps to reduce the contrasts, overall, to make an average, and to make it an exceptional visual, saturate the colors a little. But hey...

image.thumb.png.66fe203a54181d794b841251d3dae9f0.png

Montage.afphoto

— Mac Mini M2 Pro - 16Go - 512 Go – macOS Sonoma 14.7.2 – BenQ PD2700U UHD 4K —

Posted

Yes, the problem of illuminating the foreground when the light is behind it is a familiar problem for me.   When I return home and can do some more fiddling with the alignments (I am working across, L to R, and am about one third there), then I shall return to the tone/contrast issue.  I used to be an accountant, once upon a time, so I know all about work-in-progress,

Thanks for your advice!

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