![]() Go to the Skylum account login page here.Please note that your HDR Merge purchase is automatically linked to your billing email, so make sure to log in to a Skylum account associated with that email. Not for all images, of course: but for many high-contrast scenes taken with natural light.The download process starts in your Skylum account. Still a small fraction of what our eyes can see, but an astonishing bonus of digital photography. So with no effort on my part I end up with (say) 5 images that make a composite that is well-aligned and well-exposed over - potentially - more than half (8EV) of the full dynamic range of the sensor. I have it set-up as a toggle-button-press on my camera. The OM-1 (and many other cameras, I think) will make the exposure brackets automatically in RAW (and will composite JPEGs in camera if you want: I don’t), shooting them at very high speed, and stabilized to minimize ‘ghosting’, over a predetermined EV range with the ‘base’ exposure set at anywhere I wish (I use +/- 2EV between the images in each bracket). That said, I still wouldn’t bother with HDR if it weren’t so easy to do. But I find there’s always some penalty in the quality of the result: I suppose for the obvious physical reason that the photo-sites are under-saturated. With the help of DXO-PL I, too, can recover a surprising amount of data from areas that seem to be black in the RAW images. I use an OMSystems OM-1 that also has great dynamic range although much lower resolution than your Nikon. Nikons are justly famous for their dynamic range. For images in which a tripod is not allowed (eg, many interior imaging situations), does anyone have opinions of the dark recovery PL6E for the Z9 versus the Z9 bracketed HDR? I will do some experiments myself assuming that Affinity 2 does a satisfactory job of HDR (the claim made for Luminar NEO), or if there are other recommended non-Mac/Apple environment applications (I do not own any hardware with the Apple logo). ![]() For night sky images, the starlight mode of the Z9 I have found to give superior results for a non-astronomical setup (ie, not using a lens system specific designed for astronomy). However, despite the high dynamic range of the current professional Nikon bodies as recorded in NEF, there may be better rendition if a HDR technique (such as provided by the HDR bracketing regimen of the Z9) is used. I also have used it with a fisheye to get a pseudo-pano crop, particularly for high dynamic range subjects (sunsets over a dark land/seascape). With the D850 and Z9, I too use the “dark recovery” of PL that has improved with the most recent release of PL6E complete. There’s no ‘Deep Prime’ for the export of the processed TIFF files, of course, but the final image probably won’t need it. Clear-View, exposure-values and saturation/vibrance, gives a far superior result. In any case, it’s important, in my view, to use the least amount of toning (or ‘tonal compression’) possible in any of these external programs (I use Photomatix ‘neutral’ setting), because toning the resulting TIFF in DXO, especially using theTone Curve and DXO-masks for e.g. Finally, for HDR panoramas (or even single HDR images) PT-GUI is very reliable, ‘automatically’ detecting which images to fuse and which groups to stitch for the pano. ![]() I don’t use the NIK suite but HDR-Effects has its fans. I use PhotoMatix but Easy-HDR will also do a good job. There are several HDR programs that will do that on the Mac. I use an external fusion program that accepts TIFFs (or even DNGs) passed directly by DXO and that will re-export the resulting image directly to DXO for final toning. The export of a 5-image exposure bracket for HDR fusion takes about 30 seconds on my iMac (Intel, 2019). ![]() So I export TIFFs from DXO (using CMD-J on the Mac) after setting the profile (“camera natural” or “camera muted”), setting the white balance, applying optical corrections and “Deep Prime” processing (I use a preset that does all of these). I think that DXO-PL exported DNGs merely encapsulate TIFF files (or equivalent bitmaps) with added overhead. Finally (I don’t mean to be disagreeable), I find DNG an irrelevant format for external processing. ![]() Instead, you have to save the intermediate files somewhere and then load them into AP using its import dialog. But I find AP awkward compared with alternatives mainly because you can’t “pass” intermediate images directly to AP for HDR or Pano merging, as far as I know. I agree that Affinity Photo does a fine job on the exposure-fusion step. Export to DNG and pass those files to Affinity. ![]()
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