6 Comments

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  John Sadowsky - 4 years ago

  Thanks Mike! I strongly agree with your statement digital capture is about information capture that we manipulate in post! I'm in the middle of a relocation from AZ to MD. Closing and moving in the next two weeks. Once the dust settles, I will take a serious look at C1+Affinity. I've fessed up to the fact that I'll loose a lot of Lr edits, but my post skills are so much better today that anything older than a few years I'd redo anyway. I went through that when I dumped Apple Aperture for Lr. My other hobbies is programming Mac applications - I'm developing a stops true stops histogram for Mac. Since you are into HDR, you may be interested in it. I have an article about it that Kevin said is in queue. If you are interested I can send you an advanced pdf.
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  Mike Nelson Pedde - 4 years ago

  I really like Affinity. I actually have all three programs, and I like the way they work together (although I must admit I've been using CorelDraw since ver. 3 and am much more used to it than Affinity Designer). Yes, Affinity Photo does focus stacks, panoramas, HDR, HDR panoramas (in one go), and image stacks. I've never been a heavy PS user so it was maybe easier for me to switch to Affinity. I've been using Lr since 1 Beta (to 6.14) and I still prefer the DAM aspects of it but Capture One 12 is very powerful. I used to use PSE until ver. 10 or so. It was essentially a stripped down version of PS, then they changed the interface and lobotomized the program. I sometimes write blog posts targeted toward beginners. There's one on Focus Stacking for Landscapes here (Affinity and Helicon Focus): https://www.wolfnowl.com/2019/04/focus-stacking-for-landscape-photography/ and one on HDR and panoramas here: https://www.wolfnowl.com/2019/08/cell-phones-hdr-and-panoramas/ And yes, with the a7R III five images is overkill, even two stops apart. But like I tell beginning photographers, digital cameras don't capture images. Digital cameras capture light as INFORMATION. We can then take that information and make it into something that looks like an image. I only get one chance to make an image, so if I'm going to make an HDR capture I gather all of the information I can and decide what to do with it after. Mike.
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  John Sadowsky - 4 years ago

  OK - I started browsing the Affinity site. They have a 32 bit format for HDR, which is probably IEEE floating point. It also does focus stacks! I'm going to have to check it out.
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  John Sadowsky - 4 years ago

  Hmmm. I'm thinking of dumping Adobe too - for C1 + Affinity. I am afraid Adobe are going to eventually push everybody onto Lr CC. I gave Lr CC a serious go - but for a number of reasons it is a nonstarter. And why do they have to have 3 different interfaces to do the same thing: ACR, Lr Develop and Lr CC adjust? My understanding is that Affinity is a pixel processor like Photoshop. HDR merging should be done during raw rendering. Once you render to your working space (ProPhoto) you've likely lost some DR, which is why DR compression is done at RAW conversion time. I'll have to look into how Affinity does that. I do like the Lr Classic HDR merge. It creates an HDR-DNG file that stores data in floating point. Those files have a 30 stop dynamic range! (See https://protogtech.com/adobe-lightroom/adobe-dng-hdr-format/). I merge to HDR-DNG with no tone mapping, which I do myself via the usual Lr adjustments. (The other way I do HDR is to merge as layers in Photoshop - but that works only if the bright and dark areas of the image are well defined in the image.) From one of the forum threads, people have noted that C1 doesn't recognize the HDR-DNG files. :-( IMHO, seems like 5 HDR merge may be somewhat overkill.
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  Mike Nelson Pedde - 4 years ago

  John: No, Capture One doesn't (yet?) do pano merges. I stopped drinking the Adobe Koolaid a while back, so I use Affinity Photo instead. This image is from 15 base images (3 sets of 5 HDR). I know current versions of Lr can do this in one go, and so can Affinity Photo. In Lr 6.14 I can create the HDRs first and then combine those three into one pano. I really like Autopano Pro for making panoramas, but unfortunately Kolor.com has gone out of business. I exported the combined HDR-Pano from Affinity as a .tiff file and pushed that around in Capture One. Mike.
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  John Sadowsky - 4 years ago

  Does Capture One do the Pano/HDR merge? I see you shot at 50 mm, so the pano is, what, 5 portrait orientation images, with 3 HDR brackets each?