HDR Set Marking

[Adrian]

I just started using Photo Mechanic, and I love it! Great product. Here's a suggestion that would really help my workflow when working with HDR photo sets:

It would be great to be able to mark a sequence of photos as an HDR set for further processing. Some useful tools would be:

• Select multiple pictures and mark as HDR set
• Tags, color classes etc. attributed to one of that set automatically gets assigned to the rest of the set
• Ingest option to take the filename of the 0 EV compensated shot and use that for the whole sequence, with the filename of each shot now being {Zero EV comp root}_{comp} or {new user defined root}_{comp}
• Move, copy, delete etc. linked for the set. For example: if you move one of the set, the whole set moves

I'm sure there are other useful things you could do, but that's off the top of my head.

[mburke]

+1

[vish]

+ 1

[Hayo Baan]

I just started using Photo Mechanic, and I love it! Great product. Here's a suggestion that would really help my workflow when working with HDR photo sets:

It would be great to be able to mark a sequence of photos as an HDR set for further processing. Some useful tools would be:

• Select multiple pictures and mark as HDR set
• Tags, color classes etc. attributed to one of that set automatically gets assigned to the rest of the set
• Move, copy, delete etc. linked for the set. For example: if you move one of the set, the whole set moves

These do sound great but I'd like this extended to encompass any combination of shots. Not only would this be uselful for things like panoramas, but it would also be great to link e.g., the raw original with the TIFF edit… Of course you should have the ability to choose the image that is shown for this "stack" by default.

As a work-around I currently label these "input files" as I call them with label 5 (purple), and actually filter them out from the contact sheet by default. The only problem is that if I update the IPTC of one, I need to remember to do it for the others as well…

Anyway, I'm thinking/hoping that this feature will be in place when cataloguing arrives

• Ingest option to take the filename of the 0 EV compensated shot and use that for the whole sequence, with the filename of each shot now being {Zero EV comp root}_{comp} or {new user defined root}_{comp}

This wouldn't work for HDR shots made in Manual exposure mode though… As you are probably aware of already, you can get close to this behaviour if you make use of the super flexible renaming functionality in combination with snapshots (for your rename string).

Cheers,
    Hayo

[Kirk Baker]

Hayo and others,

I just started using Photo Mechanic, and I love it! Great product. Here's a suggestion that would really help my workflow when working with HDR photo sets:

It would be great to be able to mark a sequence of photos as an HDR set for further processing. Some useful tools would be:

• Select multiple pictures and mark as HDR set
• Tags, color classes etc. attributed to one of that set automatically gets assigned to the rest of the set
• Move, copy, delete etc. linked for the set. For example: if you move one of the set, the whole set moves

These do sound great but I'd like this extended to encompass any combination of shots. Not only would this be uselful for things like panoramas, but it would also be great to link e.g., the raw original with the TIFF edit… Of course you should have the ability to choose the image that is shown for this "stack" by default.

As a work-around I currently label these "input files" as I call them with label 5 (purple), and actually filter them out from the contact sheet by default. The only problem is that if I update the IPTC of one, I need to remember to do it for the others as well…

Anyway, I'm thinking/hoping that this feature will be in place when cataloguing arrives

It won't.  "Stacks" are an often requested feature and we would like to implement them, but unfortunately there are patents on the 'technology'.  One is owned by Apple and is related to automatic time-based stacking which isn't what you all are asking for.  Another patent is much more generic: http://www.google.com/patents?id=mgKdAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=stack%20images&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false and is very recent.  Now a lawyer might be able to make the case for us that since we have had RAW+JPEG pairing for a number of years already that we could expand this to a more generic type of stacking and not run afoul of either of these patents, but maybe not.  At any rate, we're not in a position to look into this theory at this time.  Maybe later.

-Kirk

[Adrian]

Kirk, I looked at the patent that you linked and I think you might be fine. I'm no patent attorney, but I did used to run the patent department at my last company so I am somewhat familiar. The patent you listed is significantly weakened in its claim language. It describes ways of displayng a number of images, but it is predicated on one of the images in the set having a different aspect ratio from the others. If all the images in the set have the same aspect ratio, then this patent does not apply. That's my experienced but non-prefessional opinion - but I would be worth having your lawyer take a look. In any case, the patent is for displaying images in a stack - I don't care about that so much as I do linking them together to treat them in a common way.

[Adrian]

This wouldn't work for HDR shots made in Manual exposure mode though… As you are probably aware of already, you can get close to this behaviour if you make use of the super flexible renaming functionality in combination with snapshots (for your rename string).

Yes, I can see how you can get close to that behavior, but it would be nice if it were super-simple. For manual bracketing you're going to have to jump in there and intervene, but for auto bracketing this woould be a nifty shortcut.

[vAfotoriporter]

Hayo and others,

I just started using Photo Mechanic, and I love it! Great product. Here's a suggestion that would really help my workflow when working with HDR photo sets:

It would be great to be able to mark a sequence of photos as an HDR set for further processing. Some useful tools would be:

• Select multiple pictures and mark as HDR set
• Tags, color classes etc. attributed to one of that set automatically gets assigned to the rest of the set
• Move, copy, delete etc. linked for the set. For example: if you move one of the set, the whole set moves

These do sound great but I'd like this extended to encompass any combination of shots. Not only would this be uselful for things like panoramas, but it would also be great to link e.g., the raw original with the TIFF edit… Of course you should have the ability to choose the image that is shown for this "stack" by default.

As a work-around I currently label these "input files" as I call them with label 5 (purple), and actually filter them out from the contact sheet by default. The only problem is that if I update the IPTC of one, I need to remember to do it for the others as well…

Anyway, I'm thinking/hoping that this feature will be in place when cataloguing arrives

It won't.  "Stacks" are an often requested feature and we would like to implement them, but unfortunately there are patents on the 'technology'.  One is owned by Apple and is related to automatic time-based stacking which isn't what you all are asking for.  Another patent is much more generic: http://www.google.com/patents?id=mgKdAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&dq=stack%20images&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false and is very recent.  Now a lawyer might be able to make the case for us that since we have had RAW+JPEG pairing for a number of years already that we could expand this to a more generic type of stacking and not run afoul of either of these patents, but maybe not.  At any rate, we're not in a position to look into this theory at this time.  Maybe later.

-Kirk

Maybe implementing stacking could be possible based on any variable or rather set of variables like in the sorting options of the contact sheet. Variables are unique to PM and sorting based on them was introduced well before Apple made the patent. So making the same sort functionality available as a stacking option could be not only very helpful but also different enough from the existing patents to be implementable without any problem.