[AP] The HDR utility could use some work.

[glenbarrington]

This was already posted on DPR

 

I've just started testing the image stacking tools in Affinity which are the reasons I've been excited most about the promise of Affinity.  All I've got right now, are some HDR suitable photos, I'm going to need to shoot some focus stacking suitable images sometime this week, but with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up in the USA next week, I'm not sure I will get to it as promptly as I would like.

 

The HDR utility isn't what I had hoped it would be.  I haven't been able to get it to accept raw images directly, it seems to want me to develop them first and convert them to a tiff (or jpg, I guess, but I never use jpg for HDR).  I've found developing raw prior to invoking the HDR utility to be a chancy thing in terms of making a good consistently developed series of raw images.  I'd rather be able to submit my raw files to the HDR utility directly and let the HDR utility do the conversion.

 

I've found it easier to do that development/conversion step in ACDSee, and convert the photos to tif files from within ACDSee, then invoke Afinity NOT as an external editor, but from the desktop, and load the photos manually into the Affinity HDR utility.  It would be nice to be able to send the selected photos directly to the stacking load area from within ACDSee.  (and without the ability to SEE the raw thumbnails from within Affinity, an all Affinity workflow is impossible for me)

 

It's kind of kludgy and isn't a smooth flow of work even from within Affinity itself. PSP's HDR utility is a much better and smoother workflow implementation even though it doesn't play all  that well with ACDSee as an HDR tool either but it's much easier to work with raw HDR series from within PSP itself.

 

The easiest way for me to deal with HDR, so far, continues to be with Photomatx Pro 5.1  I just select the 3, 5 or 7 raw files in sequence from within the ACDSee 'Manage' tab, right click the selected group and send the raw files to Photomatix set up as an external editor.  I process the photos in Photomatix, and send back an HDR in tif form to ACDSee.

 

I think there are certain HDR 'looks' that I prefer to use PSP's HDR utility for.  It's a little more complex there, but still a lot easier than Affinity's workflow.  In that case, I exit from ACDSee, launch PSP X8, go to the PSP manager tab, select the raw sequence I want to work with, and then invoke the PSP HDR utility.

 

Right now, I would like better interface with third party organizers and viewers, and a smoother, better thought out HDR utility.

 

I'm also not too impressed with the Affinity raw development, but at this point, I am assuming it is my lack of knowldge and skills with the Affinity toolset that is the cause.  But I have to admit, I like ACDSee better for raw.  

 

I think as a bit mapped editor, Affinity is pretty nice.  For me that has been its strongest most pleasant functionality so far.

I'm looking forward to testing the other components.

 

By the way, the panorama stitching was fast and easy  It isn't Hugin (and doesn't need to be), but it's better/easier than ICE

[Chris_K]

Hi glenbarrington

 

Our HDR is more designed around using the dialogs from new HDR merge rather than opening the files first then trying to merge them. The develop persona is more suited to opening RAW images to work on the individually, which is why the two methods are separate unlike some other app that do require you to open the images first.

 

The HDR merge dialog should accept RAW images without having to convert them to another format first, as the merging to HDR 32bit also acts as a develop step. 

 

I'm moving this to the feature request thread so that your feedback can be considered