Bracketeer Instruction Manual

Bracketeer 4 Instruction Manual ©2009 Pangea Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved www.pangeasoft.net support@pangeasoft.net 1 WHAT IS BRACKETEER? Bracketeer is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the Open Source applications “Enfuse” and “align_image_stack”. These applications are freely available, but they require that the user run them manually from the command line, and they natively only support TIFF and JPEG files. Bracketeer’s powerful GUI allows you to drag and drop image files for enfusing, and lets you see a live preview as you tweak the enfusing parameters. It will read almost every file format that exists (on Mac OS 10.5 or later). Additionally, Bracketeer has a powerful VR panorama preview feature which lets you preview equirectangular images as OpenGL accelerated panoramas almost instantly. Enfusing is basically a new way of doing HDR photography. With normal HDR photography you shoot several shots of a scene at different exposures, and then merge these exposures into an HDR image. That HDR image is then converted into something visible to the human eye with Tone Mapping. This is a very time consuming process, and the results are usually somewhat surreal in appearance. It is difficult to get realistic looking images with the traditional HDR process. If you are shooting bracketed shots where things are moving (such as people or leaves on a tree) then HDR has serious problems because wherever a pixel moves you’ll usually get garbage output. Enfusing, solves all of the problems with traditional HDR. Moving pixels are not a problem at all – you’ll get a nice ghosting effect rather than garbage. The entire process is much faster, and the results are much more realistic than HDR. Here is an example of an outdoor scene with 3 exposures (-2EV, 0EV, +2EV): After enfusing… 2 Enfusing results in a perfectly exposed image. Nothing is over-exposed or under-exposed – something that was impossible to achieve in a single shot. You’ll also notice that the water ripples look perfect – something that would have resulted in garbage with the traditional HDR / Tone Mapping method. 3 HOW TO USE BRACKETEER STEP 1: Shooting Bracketed Images All modern digital SLR cameras have an Exposure Bracketing feature. Most of them only let you shoot 3 bracketed shots at a maximum of +/- 2EV, but some will let you do more, and more is better when it comes to HDR and Enfuse. So, shoot between 3 and 9 bracketed images, prefereably using a tripod to ensure that the images are all aligned the same. You can shoot them hand-held if you want because Bracketeer has an auto-align feature to fix the image alignment, but nothing is…