HDRComposition Videos by Vicent Peris

[Juan Conejero]

Hi all,

Some months ago, Vicent Peris and I recorded a few videos with the intention to make a new series of video tutorials on our HDRComposition tool. We had planned to release this series during Fall this year. Unfortunately, we cannot release these videos because we don't have the required time now. The new version 1.8 of PixInsight has stolen all of our human and time resources, and releasing it is the only and absolute priority right now.

A number of users have been asking us about the HDRComposition tool recently. We have seen also some comments out there that denote a lot of confusion and misunderstanding, both in general about HDR techniques applied to astrophotography, and in particular about our implementations.

For these reasons I have decided to upload the video footage for the planned video tutorials, so all of you can watch them now. The videos have no voice, no sound and no text, but even with these limitations, I think they can be useful to help you understand the basic usage of this tool, and also some more advanced topics:

Basic usage of the HDRComposition tool with default parameters:
http://pixinsight.org/tmp/videos/01.mp4

Fixing artifacts with the mask smoothing and mask growth parameters:
http://pixinsight.org/tmp/videos/02.mp4

The M42 dataset used in this example includes images acquired with refractor and reflector telescopes. This causes some problems with diffraction patterns around stars. Vicent shows us how to fix them by performing the HDR composition in two steps, with different mask parameters:
http://pixinsight.org/tmp/videos/03.mp4

Finally, the fourth video of the series shows how to use the HDRComposition tool to fix blooming artifacts, and how to fine tune the operation with mask HDRC parameters. The video uses two images of M51 acquired with the 1.23 meter telescope of Calar Alto Observatory:
http://pixinsight.org/tmp/videos/04.mp4

I hope we'll be able to complete these videos some day. In the meanwhile, I think this can help, and as always we'll be glad to answer your questions. Also don't forget to watch Harry's video on the topic:

http://www.harrysastroshed.com/HDR%20comp.html

[Harry page]

Hi

Shame you could not finish them of , can make most of them out just needs a few blank spaces filling in I will make a list and see If I can dub over 

Harry

[mschuster]

This is off topic, but Vicent's trick of blinking with PixelMath+Undo is very handy. No need to save files and open them in Blink.  8)
Mike

[pmesquita]

A stupid newbie question:

If I have, say a M42 MASTER LIGHT of 5" + M42 MASTER LIGHT of 15" + m42 MASTER LIGHT of 25"....can I apply a HDR techinque with those 3 masters? I ask because before I stepped into AP...I fooled around a lot with HDR photos (Photomatix). And it seems to be same principle: a sub exposure + normal exposure + super exposure, all blended together.

To a newbie it seems like stacking these 3 masters would be the same as a normal HDR bracketing. Does this make sense or did I say a load of rubbish?

cheers
Paulo

[Geoff]

Hi Paulo
Check out this thread
http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=2320.0
Geoff

[dayers]

I viewed the videos and Harry's tutorial. My present level of PI expertise is not enough to get much from the tutorials, but thanks for making them available. I, too,  ask that the videos be completed, perhaps after the rush of updating to 1.8 is over and when Juan and crew have taken a deep breath and can rest a little.

I marvel at the power of PI!

Dave

[Geoff]

These videos are a big tease--enough info to show the power of HDRComposition, but too hard to come to grips with them without the sound.  It would be really good to complete them.
Geoff

[Geoff]

Hi

Shame you could not finish them of , can make most of them out just needs a few blank spaces filling in I will make a list and see If I can dub over 

Harry

Harry?

[pmesquita]

Hi all,

I just tried the  HDR composition with two m42 images (after running then independently through batch preprocessing) and the final HDR result was a big loss of detail of the longest exposure's info. Both images are H-alpha. The longest is a stack from 9x600s at ISO1600 and the shortest a stack from 3 x20s at ISO1600.

It seems that the HDR composition averaged the info of both images and made me lose quite a bit of the h-alpha info from the longest exposure stack.

Any clues on how tp balance better this HDR Comp?

Cheers
Paulo

[vicent_peris]

Hi,

Could you please share your settings? HDRC does not mix images in any way.

Regards,
Vicent.

[mads0100]

Vincent,

   Can you explain the deblooming Pixel Math portion?  So you created an initial HDR image using no masking.  This obviously left some blooming.  Then, you created another HDR (HDR1) image that has some masking (6, arbitrarily picked it looked like?)  and moved on to Pixel Math.  You typed in the HDR1 file name, removed rescaling and applied it to the original... So, what did that do to remove the blooming?

Edit: I just tried it and I can't seem to get the last part to do anything?
 
Thank you,
Chris