Time Immortal

I’ve been toying with Photomatix for a while now, and I would say that I’ve been impressed with it overall, and for the most part. But it has a few obvious issues, not the least of which is that it often produces very artifacty images. And by artifacty, I’m not referring just to increased digital noise — I’m talking about ugly, hyper-sharpened black spotting on areas with lots of microcontrast.

So I’m experimenting with Enfuse now, which purports to be a more powerful blending algorithm, capable of generating composite images that have been bracketed not only on the basis of exposure, but also on the basis of depth of field/focus. And it claims to be able to do so without producing the same quality degradation that other “conventional” HDR methods can cause.

There’s a Mac-only GUI for Enfuse, which also incorporates Hugin’s powerful image alignment algorithm, that I am currently experimenting with, called ImageFuser. The good Reader can learn more about this software at the developer’s website.

Now, any guesses as to how long my 1 GHz Powerbook G4 will take to render an HDR image, using Enfuse, out of three TIFF-format images, each of 8 megapixel resolution?

Just wanted to say that Microsoft Virtual PC, running on my 1 GHz Powerbook G4, actually makes for a not unpleasant Windows XP experience. It’s not as fast as my work PC, to be sure, but it’s hardly unbearable, even with the overhead inherent in virtualization, and even given that my laptop dates back to 2003.

Don’t ask me why I’m experimenting with this now.

Which will happen first? The end of the DVD rendering process presently at work on my Powerbook, which will produce at its conclusion a burnable DVD image of the video footage from the wedding? Or 4:00 PM?

Update: 4:00 PM finished in second place.

Looking out over the Ancient Agora from in front of the Temple of Hephaestus, I felt moved to take another panoramic image. Unfortunately, it was a very cloudy day in Athens, but I think that the resulting image, despite the lack of blue sky, is nonetheless quite impressive.

There are quite a number of images comprising this shot (if memory serves, it’s a matrix of images, at least five across and two high). As has become my usual practice for panoramic images, I began by matching exposures between shots in Lightroom, and then cleaning up things like chromatic aberration and doing some highlight recovery. With that out of the way, the images were imported into Hugin, and if memory serves I defined an absurd number of control points (as many as 30 between just two images!) in order to get some of the details (like the Stoa of Attalos, over there on the left) to line up neatly.

The render took a while as well, although it’s less painful using Hugin on my work computer (with its Core 2 Duo processor) than on my Powerbook G4.

And the result? Well, you can see for yourself, O Reader. It’s a commanding view of the Agora, and also gives just a hint of an impression of what ancient Athens must have been like.

Not strictly the best picture I’ve ever taken of a laptop.

Where was this taken?

But there is an interesting effect I want to draw your attention to, all the same. You see, I took this shot at an aperture value of f29 — a very small opening, which gives me a very large depth of field as a result (I wanted most/all of the keyboard, as well as the monitor, to be in focus).

Of course, that makes for a much longer shutter speed as a result. More than ten seconds, in fact.

And interestingly, in that time, the camera catches a very clear glimpse of the pixels on the LCD display. Ignore the swirling appearance of the zoomed-out photo — that’s just some moire effect resulting from the scaling. Up close, the grid pattern of the pixels is intact.

And kinda neat to look at.

And yes…now you all get a look at what my Powerbook’s Dock looks like, and what applications I have “at my fingertips” on a regular basis.