Order of workflow

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Marpel
Posts: 692
Joined: September 13th, 2009, 3:19 pm
What is the make/model of your primary camera?: Nikon D810
Location: Port Coquitlam, British Columbia

Order of workflow

Post by Marpel »

I have a number of photos of a waterfall, each one taken immediately after the previous, all taken with the same settings and camera position.

I have done this in the past and, in processing, I would composite each photo with another, using the Lighten blend mode. This results in the areas in one photo where the water happens not to be (black rock), to hopefully get filled with water from another image. Results are a "fuller" waterfall.

This time, however, the four raw files have a strong blue cast.

My question, does it matter whether I do a color balance to each photo first, then composite the corrected photos or should they be composited first and then the color balance done on the final image?

I suspect it may not matter much, but wanted to be sure.

And, as a result of a prior occurrence where it appears the camera moved very (very) slightly during the capture of multiple images for later compositing as above, I have gotten into the habit of, when compositing two exact images (except for the variation in water trails), zooming in very closely (like 1:1 then four or five more times past that), then either moving the opacity slider to 50% and trying to determine if the images line up, or zooming in and moving the slider from 0 to 100% to see if the outcome image (or whatever it is called on the right side of the view) changes. If noticeably out, I would use one point alignment, and the arrows, to move one image into perfect alignment with the other.

The problem with each method is although there are solid rock areas in the images, these zoomed in area(s) look different due to water spray. Even if the images are a pixel or two out, because this is a composite of up to 7-8 images, the final result starts to look blurry.

Any suggestions on the best way to determine if two images are perfectly aligned?

Marv
jsachs
Posts: 4203
Joined: January 22nd, 2009, 11:03 pm

Re: Order of workflow

Post by jsachs »

I would remove the color cast first, but it probably doesn't matter.

You might also consider the Stack Images transformation which can composite multiple images.

To check how well images are aligned, try setting Operation to Absolute Difference and then you can increase the Strength to exaggerate the differences.
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
Marpel
Posts: 692
Joined: September 13th, 2009, 3:19 pm
What is the make/model of your primary camera?: Nikon D810
Location: Port Coquitlam, British Columbia

Re: Order of workflow

Post by Marpel »

Thanks Jonathan.
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