Tema: Impressive work (but) complex GUI

Dear friends

First of all, let me congratulate you for your work. I'm a photographer myself (working with analogue and digital cameras) and I find these programs to be very clever designed - Perfect RAW, in particular, seems to be quite a step ahead, especially if it permits HDR.

I've tried all Exposure Blending and HDR solutions with less than satisfactory results - Photomatix and such produces very unreal outputs that are not at all suited for Fine Art photographers. Then moved to TuFuse (and TuFusion) with much more natural results however still noisy. Have not yet fully tried Zero Noise and Perfect RAW as the GUI seems a bit complex for Computer Science ignorants like myself.

At this point, I'm only interested in Fine Art Black & White photography. Please allow me to let you know about my needs believing that perhaps I might also be helping other folks (with similar needs):

a) A more simple tool/GUI to work with my digital bracketed images. Like dragging -2,0,+2 shots and, with one or two clicks, get the results: a Higher Dynamic Range, less noise and, if possible, a Black & White output.

b) A basic Photoshop action to Tone Map the result with Photoshop. Or having that option as a second step of your program (inside it, I mean).

c) The ability to also work with scanned negatives (16 bit linear Tif) and bring all the benefits of HDR to beautiful old school quality captures.

I'm very impressed with your work. Just wishing it could be a tad simpler to use. My fault, much probabely...

Warm regards from Portugal,
Imagem

Hi Imagem, using Zero Noise to get B&W images is much simpler than you may think.

1. Set white balance to preset 'None' and output colour profile to 'None' as well.
2. Click 'Develop', then 'Calc EV', then 'Build map' (recommended to set 2 pixels of progressive blending for map building)
3. Click 'T' and find out in the generated GIF the R and B ratios you like best
4. Set those 2 values in the sliders and click 'B&W'

The generated tif will be a minimum noise, maximum sharpness b&w image ready to be manually tone mapped in PS, or using other tools. It will also preserve ALL of the highlithts information contained in the RAW file.
I did the steps above, and then made 2 extra replicas from the output image with different overexposures:

Then TuFuse managed to properly preserve and display the very high dynamic range (12 f-stops of real DR) information from the window highlights to the deepest shadows. TuFuse generated minor shade artifacts that can be seen in the right border of the window.

The combination of Zero Noise + TuFuse provides maximum noise reduction, sharpness and a reallistic looking, all in an automated process.

Basic old school?

Me parece un error enorme el querer "fabricar" imágenes antiguas con métodos modernos.
¿No es mas fácil hacer lo que hacía antes?

I think it is a big mistake to try to produce old looking images with modern methods.
Why not to do what you did before?

Thank you very much Guillermo for the detailed explanation.
Your samples look very good to my eyes.

I was somehow surprised to see that Zero Noise is the way to go for quality B&W outputs - I'll give it a try and post the results in short.

Keep up the good work

Warm regards from Portugal,
imagem
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Trying to follow your workflow. Two questions:

- You mention that you have made "2 extra replicas from the output image with different overexposures" - how exactly did you do it? Within Zero Noise software as well? adjusting gamma? Any other way?

- Final result came with watermark - no clue how to avoid it.

Ty very much for your support.
As soon as I run the tests I'll share the results here.