How to Group AEB Photos

[redserv]

Hi guys
This is a noob question. I shoot RAW AEB PHOTOS with my Mavic 3 normally in groups of 5 Photos at a time. However when i take multiple groups of different photos, how do you guys know which photos belong to a group when editing to make a HDR photo. I normally will have to check that each photo looks almost the same. Is there tool or technique you guys use when you have lots of photos?

 

[TheGroove]

Hi guys
This is a noob question. I shoot RAW AEB PHOTOS with my Mavic 3 normally in groups of 5 Photos at a time. However when i take multiple groups of different photos, how do you guys know which photos belong to a group when editing to make a HDR photo. I normally will have to check that each photo looks almost the same. Is there tool or technique you guys use when you have lots of photos?

I typically shoot in groups of 3 so it's a bit easier but I'll usually just count in LRC. Also, I try to shift enough between each shot to make a noticeable enough difference and look to corners or edges to see it.

 

[kmohr3]

They will be named sequentially so just count. Also, if you use Bridge to cull your images, in the metadata it will show you 0, -1, +1, -2, +2, so you'll know that it was a bracketed set.

 

[Vic Moss]

Depending on which HDR program you use, it does it automatically.

My workflow consists of processing the RAW into 16 bit tiff files (color corrected, etc) before running them through one of my HDR programs, and naming them differently for each bracket. That also helps.

 

[Dale D]

Hi guys
This is a noob question. I shoot RAW AEB PHOTOS with my Mavic 3 normally in groups of 5 Photos at a time. However when i take multiple groups of different photos, how do you guys know which photos belong to a group when editing to make a HDR photo. I normally will have to check that each photo looks almost the same. Is there tool or technique you guys use when you have lots of photos?

This is an easy one! When you are planning to shoot a series of images, either HDR or pano, my first and last shot are at the ground. My default C1 tilts the gimbal to the ground. I hit the C1 toggle, shot a ground photo, then proceed with the series of shots, and the last shot I tilt to the ground. Easy peasy. When you line up you images in software, you can immediately tell where your shots begin and end. (On the ground, I shoot my hand first and last).

Dale
Miami

 

[redserv]

Thank you guys for all your tips and help. I will certainly give some of them a try

 

[BigAl07]

I have them grouped by Date/Time. This way, if I am manually manipulating them I know 5, 5, 5, 5 (or 3, 3, 3, if shooting 3 shots).

The programs I use for HDR utilize the METADATA to group, merge, and process them automatically. It's literally just a couple of clicks and they are merged. Some days I'll have hundreds of shots and they can all be merged in under 5 minutes.

 

[Richard R]

If you look at the Metadata Date and Time then all photos are identically stamped.

 

[Dale D]

If you look at the Metadata Date and Time then all photos are identically stamped.

Yes- that is true but really too much time needed if you just follow my trick above- shoot the ground before and after the sequence. It will be plainly different that the subject series.

 

[twickers14]

This is an easy one! When you are planning to shoot a series of images, either HDR or pano, my first and last shot are at the ground. My default C1 tilts the gimbal to the ground. I hit the C1 toggle, shot a ground photo, then proceed with the series of shots, and the last shot I tilt to the ground. Easy peasy. When you line up you images in software, you can immediately tell where your shots begin and end. (On the ground, I shoot my hand first and last).

Dale
Miami

That’s a great idea Dale. The simple ones are the best.

 

[Deleted member 162835]

I typically shoot AEB with three images. On a windows PC if you right click the image and go to details you can see the exposure compensation setting of each image. If I shoot a ton of images I'll use this to verify I have my groups of images correct while sorting or after as a quick check.

 

[ECI Air]

Hi guys
This is a noob question. I shoot RAW AEB PHOTOS with my Mavic 3 normally in groups of 5 Photos at a time. However when i take multiple groups of different photos, how do you guys know which photos belong to a group when editing to make a HDR photo. I normally will have to check that each photo looks almost the same. Is there tool or technique you guys use when you have lots of photos?

This is the way I do it, since I download then make my HDR in lightroom. When I'm in the air, i just rotate the drone 15 degrees, for a different image, switch to single shot, then take the shot or rotate the gimble upwards.

 

[dajomu]

My normal batch-oriented HDR workflow is to turn on exposure bracketing for an entire flight, so all of my "shots" taken during that flight have 3 or 5 associated image files whose names are in numerical order. I use Photomatix Pro to process them in batch, and all I have to do is tell it whether there are 3 or 5 files per image, and it takes care of grouping them automatically. It also has the ability to group based on the time between shots, which usually works, but can be a bit fiddly, especially when shooting in low light.

Sometimes I switch to bracketing within a flight, with the intent to process brackets selectively, in Lightroom. To simplify that, I use LR's "Autostack by Capture Time..." commend (in Grid view select all your images, then Right Click on any thumbnail in Grid and select Stacking > Autostack by Capture Time...). Use the slider that comes up to pick an appropriate Time Between Stacks. For sunny day shooting, 1 or 2 seconds usually works. LR will place all of the groups of images shot within that interval into separate stacks. Still in Grid view, if you Right Click on a stack and pick Photo Merge > HDR, LR will create an HDR .dng file from all of the images in that stack, which you can then adjust as desired. Read up on other ways to manipulate image stacks in LR, for other useful techniques that will help you hand craft HDR or merged images in external programs such as Photomatix of PS.

Hope that helps.

 

[chong67]

There is no need to shoot in brackets.

Take a DNG, move the EV to -1, save the photo and thats your Neg 1 bracket, etc etc.

 

[dajomu]

There is no need to shoot in brackets.

Take a DNG, move the EV to -1, save the photo and thats your Neg 1 bracket, etc etc.

This is quite a misleading statement. The scenes we shoot often contain 20 stops or more of dynamic range. The higher end Mavic cameras have a dynamic range that's less than 13 stops. If you want to capture more than 13 stops of information with your Mavic, you'll have to shoot multiple image at different exposure settings. This is why we shoot brackets. While adjusting the EV of a single DNG in post darkens or lightens the overall image and let's you feed the resulting new files into HDR sw for interesting results, it doesn't recover any portions of the scene whose dynamic range were not captured by the original single exposure. See Exposure Bracketing: What It Is and How to Do It for a nice article that explains this more completely. That said, you can often capture enough dynamic range with a 13-stop camera, so that you don't need to shoot brackets.

 

[chong67]

Yes, what I do usually is ... I know where to look for medium exposure, after a while, you get this and it take practice, then I do luminosity masking and do smart copy on the EV sliding it up/down.

The only time when you need to do brackets is when there is deep dynamic range, like when you do window pull.

 

[Robert Prior]

If you are always shooting bracketed it's easy — just group every five images together.

When shooting my DSLR I often put a hand in front of the camera before and after a sequence, to make an easy way to distinguish start/end when looking at tiny thumbnails. Can't do that with the drone, of course, but a quick one-second movie before/after has the same effect. Or shoot pure blue sky before/after — anything that is easy to spot.

 

[MS Coast]

@Robert Prior said, "just group every five images together."

Yes. This process has helped me do that, to delete unwanted bracketing shots when I've done a lot of shooting under similar lighting conditions and just want to delete or copy the same exposure variant from each set of shots, like all the -0.3 shots.

Isolate the multiple exposure shots in a folder and open a file manager with thumbnail view. Then adjust the width of the window to show three or five thumbnails in each row. It's easier then to select columns of thumbnails to delete or move particular exposure sets.