I'm wondering whether anyone has any experience to relate using this product:

PhotoAcute

Hi Mark
If you do a search you'll find 5 threads where it is mentioned/discussed.
Good light! - Hening

Ya, I've been through a fair bit of that stuff - all dated and not that informative. I'm looking for recent and serious experience.

I've had good success using it to process HDR images, usually combining 4-6 tripod mounted shots, and I prefer it to using Photomatix, seems to handle/remove C/A very well and output a very natural looking file. Here's one I shot recently and processed with Photo Acute, although it has had more work in Photoshop afterwards -




.

Thats a great picture!

Thanks for recounting your experience - and indeed - great shot - makes me want to come to New Zealand, which I hear is very photogenic in many places.

I have a licence and used it a few months ago to try to do HDR on handheld images, but my conclusion at that time was that nothing could touch PTgui Pro for alignement of hand held HDR. I was frankly not overly impressed by the alignement/HDR capability of Photoaccute. I have not had the chance to test their super-resolution thing, but all the samples are focusing no very low res images to start with.

I have recently done a bit of HDR (on tripod this time) and again found PTgui Pro to be the best thanks to their brilliant alignement capability and implementation of Enfuse algo for automatic masking in a 16 bits space.



Regards,
Bernard

Thanks for the assessment Bernard - and the image looks very "zen"!

Cheers,

Mark

Very "natural" HDR picture Bernard !

Have a nice Day.

Thierry

Bonjour Bernard,

How many pictures did you use to achieve such a result ?

As you are certainly now "expert" with PTGui, do you have "basic settings" that give good results and good "starting point" ?!

Have a Nice Day.

Thierry

Thierry,

I used 6 images one stop away from each other.

Let's make things very clear, I am not an expert of anything besides Belgian beers. :-)

As far as PTgui goes, I use the Pro version to compensate for my lack of expertise, besides it is pretty straighforward.

One key aspect is to use both lens light fall off and points optimizations. I use optimizations of points in an iterative way until I get an average error around 0.3 (meaning that I delete all the points with large optimization errors). This can only be achieved if the entrance pupil of the lens was correctly positionned atop the rotation axis of the pano head while shooting.

Enfuse style HDR can is - I believe - only availabe in the pro version and enables you to brighten shadows and darken highlights with recovery like sliders. That is the best implementation of Enfuse I have seen anywhere and the reason why I like it. Then you often need to polish up the work in PS with a few masked curves to restore a bit of pops. Finish with a good beer and you are ready to go!

Cheers,
Bernard

Bernard,

You omitted the most essential technical detail: Which beer?

Cheers,

Eric

Delerium Tremens, if he claims to be an expert :-)

A good pick for sure. My personnal favorites are the Bruge Triple and Lachouffe.

Cheers,
Bernard