Quote:

Hi all,

I've been playing around with HDR blending (blending 2 or more of the same image at different exposures via RAW conversion) with some success. Of course, new DSLR's (newer than my D200) capture a higher dynamic range to begin with, but in absence of that... Anyway, I wonder if there's any software out there you are aware of that would allow me to stitch together panoramas in RAW format BEFORE converting to other formats? I am basically looking to create a single RAW source file.

Thanks!



Holger,

There are a few panorama software programs out there that will use Nikon raw files to stitch together a panorama. However, to my knowledge there is no software that will save that stitched pano back to a Nikon NEF formatted file. This would be a pretty good reverse engineering trick considering how structured the NEF format is and the fact that Nikon keeps a pretty tight rein on use of their proprietary raw format.

You can however save the stitched pano to a tif file and edit in any of the usual suspect raster editing programs. Personally, I use Panomaker4 Pro by Arcsoft for my panos. It will stitch D200-300 NEF files and does a pretty good job of blending trasitions for perspective and lighting. It also has a manual adjust for those really hard stitching situations. I have found however that instead of using the raw files I sometimes get better results by using NX2 to process the NEFs into tif files and then stitching. The trick is to process each NEF file exactly the same (except for some local changes with control points) to get a well blended tif file.

You can see some of my pano work at

http://www.lamsonweb.com/Galleries/Panomania/

Hope this helps,

Geo

Some of my best
http://www.lamsonweb.com/Galleries/Photography
http://lamson.zenfolio.com/