HDR merge and panorama

[MoreK]

I've been trying out Affinity Photo's HDR merge couple of times with 360x180 panoramas. Today I had problems when composing an indoor photosphere. One of the images had a window and incoming sun rays. After HDR stacking the image lightning and contrast was different than with the rest of the images.

 

I used full manual settings in the camera and the same Affinity HDR preset for all the images.

 

It looks like that HDR merging has a dynamic nature and the results vary depending on the lightning and contrast of the scene. Is this correct? Is there a way to set "static" or "manual" behavior for HDR, so that the end result is the same compared to other HDR stacks?

 

This is quite new area to me, so I may be asking stupid questions here, or doing things wrong way. If you have any tips or experience on the HDR panorama workflow, please let me know.

 

I'm using Hugin for stitching the photosphere together.

[John Rostron]

33 minutes ago, MoreK said:

After HDR stacking the image lightning and contrast was different than with the rest of the images.

Hardly surprising really. The HDR processing will not be aware of the lighting in the other adjacent images and will generate a merge based only on the images provided. You could try adjusting the tone mapping to make the final merge as close as possible to the adjacent images. It is an inherent problem with wide panoramas that the lighting can be inconsistent across many images.

 

John