Capture One 22 - Evaluating HDR Merge

hi everybody my name is walter rowe you've probably seen some of my other videos i'm a capture one affiliate and today we're going to talk about the hdr merge tool in the new capture 122 released december 9th 2021 capture one recommends for hdr merge that you capture one frame properly exposed and two more frames at plus and minus two stops from properly exposed went out and captured a nine frame sequence and two-thirds stops a difference between each frame and i wanted to test whether merging more frames fewer frames frames that capture more than two stops of dynamic range produce any better results or if the guidance from capture one of properly exposed frame and two frames plus or minus two stops cat uh produces uh the same result better worse results does the guidance really uh echo the results or i should say do the results echo the guidance so today we're gonna take a look at that here we have uh the result of an hdr merge this is three frames two stops uh plus and minus uh in the in the product now here's the original nine frames that were taken this was a properly exposed frame it's actually a little underexposed but this was the the center image if you will in terms of exposure and then there's one through four frames that are underexposed this is minus two-thirds minus one and one-third minus two and then minus two and two-thirds and then here we have the four overexposed frames we have plus two thirds plus one and one third plus two stops and then plus two and two third stops and so i've selected all nine of those frames and i right clicked and i selected hdr merge and i chose an auto align i did not choose auto adjust i made my own adjustments i'm not going to go through the actual merging process that takes quite a few minutes and i don't want to spend your time just sitting there spinning wheels while we do that here's the result of the of the merge it looks pretty good i'll turn on exposure warnings you can see even after the merge i have high dynamic range set at minus 80 for highlight and minus 80 for white and we still have a couple places where we're getting an exposure warning now i set my exposure warning at 253 if i set it all the way to 255 and maybe set my shadow warning to zero we actually still get a little bit of warning you can see if i mouse over there that the readouts across the top the red is clipped and if we look at the over here in the histogram we see it is kind of coming right up to the edge so right in there there is clipping here's the readout uh here's clipping uh in the in the red channel at um uh at 255. in that one little area let me bring this back to 253 just this is where i normally put things plus two for shadow and 253 for highlights uh okay so that's nine frames merged you can just kind of see the pattern of the histogram and one thing that i did as i created my different merges was i try to produce a similar histogram with each set of frames what i do want to show you is the before if i do the before and show you the exposure warning you can see as i mouse over here's 255 255 255 so many places around the sky really blown out and if i hit f2 to do a new variant that has no adjustments applied you can see how exposed to the right this is this room i mean everything is clipping on the on the highlight side completely blown out i'm going to delete that variant i don't need it uh so now let's take a look at some different options i did for five frames that you can see there's a 5a a 5b and a 5c here these are all selecting five frames but i chose a different five set of five frames for each one of these for the 5a i chose the proper exposure i chose every other frame just like this for the five frames so this one gets the minus two stops as the most underexposed frame but it gets the plus two and two third stops as the most overexposed frame so i selected those and that gave me this product here this is my 5a so that's five frames merged together uh if i turn off exposure warning you can see i mean it's you can see this histogram here's the nine frame oops here's the nine frame and here's the uh five frame all uh in fact i'll just bring these up here together like this so like as i switch between them you can see the histogram is almost identical you see the blue channel is probably clipped a little more in the nine frame and not so much in the five frame so the result of that is that to me using nine frames let's go to exposure warning we got the same little exposure warning after applying our adjustments what is also interesting if we look at the adjustments i applied in the nine frame image i had to apply a minus 0.85 under exposure to get to the same histogram that i got with the five frame with a plus 0.2 exposure so there's a full stop of difference in the product of the hdr merge and in fact you can just even look along here as i mouse over these are very bright little area right in here and over here it's just a little less bright not much but but just a tad like there just might be a little more recovery here which makes a lot of sense i actually had to pull this down by 0.85 and i had to add plus 0.2 for the 5 frame so if i do the let me go back into the before and afters here here you can see before and after comparing i'm sorry the before of both frames the right side frame is no adjustments applied you can see all these areas where it's blown out the left side frame is where only five images were selected instead of um instead of nine images and here you can see there's actually less exposure warning in the before picture with just five frames so five frames actually produced a better result than nine frames so right there you know capture one telling us more frames isn't necessarily better there seems to be some evidence right here let's go and pick uh 5b so 5b i chose 5 frames but instead of choosing the most overexposed frame and and every other one i chose the the most underexposed frame and every other one so i go from minus two and two thirds top to plus two-thirds stop that's what gives us 5b so in 5b and here i'll bring up 5b and 5a together this is uh before for both of them and you can see the before is almost identical uh in the before on 5a we have from minus two stops to plus two and two third stops in 5b we have minus two and two-thirds stops to plus two stops so we have less overexposure more underexposure but we get effectively the same result in the hdr merge if i do the after you can see the little bits of exposure warning even with the recovery you can see i have the same adjustments applied to both you can see that the um histogram is almost identical in both and so uh five frames doesn't matter which set of five frames i select i get pretty much the same result so then i said well let me try um the minus let me try the the the right frame the properly exposed frame let me tech try the two adjacent frames the minus and plus two thirds of a stop and then let me try the minus and plus um one and one third stop and and merge those together and actually this goes from it goes to uh minus two stops i'm sorry so there's minus two stops minus a third of a stop two-thirds of a stop and plus two-thirds of the stop and then plus two stops along with the the the center exposure frame so i merged those together and that gave me 5c 5c we end up with pretty much the same thing as we did with five a and b so it seems to not matter which five frames i select let me go and give them all to you here here's all three five frame sequences and if i turn before and after on you can see that they're almost all identical in where they're overexposed and where i have to do recovery and they all have the same adjustments applied to them you can see the histogram is the same for all of them you know if i do after you can see they all produce pretty much the same result and so five frames um better than nine frames but which five frames i choose doesn't seem to make a difference then i said okay capture one recommends two two stops plus or minus along with your properly exposed frame so i did i chose the properly exposed frame and then i chose the minus two and i chose the plus 2. so this gives you 1 100 of a second that's not the right one it gives you 1 100 of a second sorry 1 400th of a second that's two stops and 1 25th of a second that's two stops so there's exposure exposure minus two stops exposure plus two stops merged those together and produced this image here's before exposure warning you can see this exposure warning looks quite similar to the five frame sequence here's a five frame sequence you can see they look very similar what does this really tell us what's this tells us five frames not better than three frames what we also find is that with nine frames actually worse so three frames plus or minus two stops five frames nine frames more is not better we're actually getting the best result with what capture one recommended as exposure exposure minus two stops exposure plus two stops so i hope this has been helpful for you this has certainly been helpful for me in verifying the guidance that capture one has given us for which frames we should select and how they should be exposed to use the hdr merge in the new capture 122 that was released in december of 2021 thanks for your time hope you've enjoyed this video i hope you find it helpful please click the subscribe button if you have any comments or questions put them in the comments below i do my very best to be responsive and always reply to people and feel free to share the video share um you know the the channel i appreciate it uh and i hope you have a great day thanks

Channel: Walter Rowe Photography

Views: 237

Keywords: Capture One, Photography, How-To, Raw Editor, Tutorial, Post Processing, Digital Asset Management, Capture One Sessions, Capture One Catalogs, Live Stream

Id: WpvXwjZTMOY

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021