Tips to merging many HDR photos at once?

[LawrenceChiu]

So, I made a HDR time lapse and shot over 5000+ photos. (2500 photos when merge into HDR)
Is there a way to merge all those photos at once in one go? I don't want to manually merge one by one.
Any tips?

 

[D-B-J]

You can batch process with Photomatix Pro. What software are you using?

Jake

 

[KmH]

Can Photomatix Pro merger 5000+ photos?

FAQ about HDR photography software Photomatix - Tone Mapping, HDR images creation and Exposure Fusion
What is the maximum file size that I can work with?

The file size to consider for Photomatix is the size expressed in number of pixels, i.e. width X height. Since Photomatix has to decompress the images for processing, the compression factor of the input images does not make any difference in the ability to process large files.

The maximum file size (in number of pixels) that you can process with Photomatix depends on the following:

• the RAM your computer has
• whether your OS is 32-bit or 64-bit
• the pixel depth of your images
• the number of bracketed photos you are merging
• the number of other memory-hungry applications opened on your computer
• the free space available on your hard drive

Additionally, it is important to note that there is an upper limit to the amount of RAM that is made available to applications like Photomatix. On Windows 32-bit, this limit is as low as 2 GB, regardless of your RAM. That is, it will still be 2 GB via virtual memory if you computer has less than 2 GB RAM, but it won't be more than 2 GB if your computer has 4 GB RAM (unless you enable the /3GB switch).

External memory fragmentation further limits the memory available to Photomatix, by making it impossible to allocate a contiguous block of memory large enough for the processing needed. External memory fragmentation is a problem on Windows OSes, particularly on Windows XP. It means that the system does not organize the available memory efficiently, making it unable to re-use the memory that Photomatix has released.

When you create a particularly large Radiance .hdr file in another application and want to tone map it in Photomatix Pro, you have the option to open the file in so-called "Preview" mode. This will load a low resolution version of the file, thereby avoiding saturating the memory available for the user interface when adjusting the tone mapping settings. The final process will then run in the background and apply the tone mapping settings to the full resolution file.

For an idea of the memory necessary to process your images, the following formulae give a rough estimate of the amount of memory (RAM) needed in number of bytes:

Merging bracketed photos to HDR:

width * height * (3 * (bit-depth/8) * numberOfImages + 6)

Tone Mapping with Details Enhancer a Radiance file (.hdr extension) opened in "Preview" mode with the Lighting Effects Mode box checked:

width * height * 18

This means that merging three 100 MegaPixels 16-bit images to HDR requires around:

100,000,000 * (3 * 2 * 3 + 6) = 2.4 GB

and tone mapping a 100 MegaPixels Radiance file with Details Enhancer (Lighting Effects Mode box checked) requires around:

100,000,000 * 18 = 1.8 GB

 

[petrochemist]

Can Photomatix Pro merger 5000+ photos?

I wouldn't expect the memory factors you attached to be relevant to batch processing.
In batch processing the software will sequentially handle multiple images using the same settings, so as long as memeory is eaisly sufficent for one HDR set, it should be OK for the subsequent sets.

There may be issues with having that many photos in a single directory, or even gradual build up of 'released' memory which is often not handled properly by windows. It would probably be wiser to run multiple batches keeping to a few hundred images at a time

 

[LawrenceChiu]

I batched up 5000 photos with photomatix with no problem. Although it did took like 2.5 hours to process them all.

 

[Waldo32487]

Dang, 5000+ photos!?

What size memory card did you use?