hdrprep

Usage

The options -a, -r, and -e correspond roughly to steps one to three as explained under 'How it works'. While -a and -r are mutually exclusive, both may be accompanied by -e, which may also be run separately.

Align Images, -a|--align

  1. Sort images by exposure.
  2. Run ALE. The directory under which the text files with the x and y offset for each pair of images are stored defaults to './aligned' but may be changed with the -d|--dir option. This part takes most of the time. Depending on the number of images and resolution, it takes some ten to 20 minutes on my AMD Sempron 3100+.
  3. Crop the images with ImageMagick, using the offsets from the ALE-created text files. The quality setting of the new images defaults to 80 but may be modified with the -q|--quality option. The newly created images are also saved under './aligned' or -d|--dir with names identical to those supplied on the command line.
hdrprep --quality 80 --dir test --align dscn602?.jpg

Redo cropping, -r|--redo

Works similarly to -a, but does not run ALE. This is useful primarily for experimenting with different settings for -q|--quality without involving the time-consuming image registration with ALE again.

  1. Sort images by exposure.
  2. Crop the images with ImageMagick, using the offsets from the ALE-created text files. The quality setting of the new images defaults to 80 but may be modified with the -q|--quality option. The newly created images are also saved under './aligned' or -d|--dir with names identical to those supplied on the command line.

This option requires a previous run with -a into the same directory.

hdrprep --quality 60 --dir test --redo dscn602?.jpg

Fix EXIF header, -e|--exif

May be run stand-alone or in combination with -a or -r. If files with identical names as those supplied on the command line are found in './aligned' or -d|--dir, the EXIF header is fixed in them. If no files are found, the originals as given on the command-line are copied into './aligned' or -d|--dir first.

hdrprep --dir test --exif dscn602?.jpg

hdrprep never touches your original files and always works on copies.