LRTimelapse Forum

Hi Gunther,

what do you think about the idea to get the luminosity values from unaltered linear metadata, since you never know what funky things like curves or other stuff the camera applied to the embedded jpegs?

Deflickering data should become (alot?) more accurate by this method I suppose.

I know this will increase processing time, but since you only want simple white balanced data, you could use the fastest debayering and skip all the unnecessary operations like gamma correction, settings white points, etc. pp.
Maybe you could even get away with no debayering at all?

What do you think about it?

David

Hi Joachim, good idea but currently not on my agenda since it would cause too much effort do a manual readout of the different raw types. Say it would be too much work for too little improvement. For best results I recommend to turn off all in-camera editing.

Hi Gunther,

sorry for my late reply, been pretty busy with other photo stuff..
The problem is that there is no real linear picture style available for Canon AFAIK and I guess it is the same for Nikon. Even if there would be one, there are reasons not to use them in the field like having a decent preview on the camera display or having a histogram you can work with instead of a linear one where blown out means basically unrecoverable instead of the standard picture style where a little bit blown out is totally fine because you can you use the recovery/highlights slider to salvage those areas.

I personally wouldn't having a RAW analysing stage where dcraw is used to get true linear data even if it takes a while to process everything.
If there is a way to get even better deflickering I think it is worth to be explored since having a flicker free TL is one of the key ingredients to have a perfect result.

Have you had a look at the commands of DCraw? I am not a programmer but to me it seems pretty straightforward and not that complicated to implement?!

David

Okay, I'm going to have a look at DCRaw when I find some time. Tough: Deflicker can never be perfect for all kind of sequences. It depends from so much parameters, best is to avoid it whilst shooting.
Even doing what you propose wouldn't be able to cause miracles...

Thanks Gunther.
I am looking forward to your findings - of course I am aware that even linear data won't give perfect deflickering results.

David