Real estate photo editors have been constantly learning ways to improve their skills, whether by practicing on their own or utilizing useful tools or plugins.
For those editors who have spare time, they can practice several editing techniques at their own pace. However, for some, using plugins help them learn the editing technique and make the work fast and easy.
- Adobe Lightroom has a rather limited capacity for working with multiple exposures, so if you want to blend different images together without leaving Lightroom LR/Enfuse just might do the trick. You can use LR/Enfuse to create a more natural-looking image with a greater dynamic range than a single exposure offers.
- Lightroom Information provides a brief evaluation of an interesting fresh Lightroom plugin known as Enfuse. Is definitely LR/Enfuse plugin for Lightroom redundant now that Lightroom has. To use LR/Enfuse plugin within lightroom compared to the. Move to Adobe Lightroom or even. Photographer'h Toolbox plugins for Adobe Photoshop.
So, before anything else, here is a definition of plugin for better understanding.
I assume that I need to tell LR through the manager where LREnfuse resides. Before I launch the install, perhaps Ill get a little help here. This is the place you have to point the plugin to when configuring. It loaded in Program Files as Enfuse-Enblend, inside the folder is bin and doc.
Plugin Defined
In most computer software, a plugin is an additional component added to the existing program to give a specific feature.
Depending on the software and the plugin developer, some plugins are available for free while others have premium subscriptions to unlock all the features it offers.
In this article, you will learn what LR/Enfuse is and how it helps photo editors.
What is LREnfuse?
LR/Enfuse is an Adobe Lightroom plugin.
It allows you to blend multiple exposures together directly in Lightroom, without using another software. You just need to install this plugin and use it as an open source application.
LR/Enfuse provides a convenient interface to blend images. In a nutshell, all you need to do is select the images that need blending and choose “Blend Exposures Using LR/Enfuse” from the File menu.
With LR Enfuse, you can do the following:
- Blend images for night photography to achieve a longer exposure than a single frame.
- Blend images with different focal points to create a greater depth of field. This is usually best for macro images.
- Blend images of different exposures to create a natural-looking image with an improved dynamic range.
Typically, this plugin is part of the classic Adobe Classic Lightroom’s presets and plugins and is available in free and paid versions.
Specifically, the trial version limits the output size to 500px. But if you choose to donate for the betterment of this tool, you can get a registration code that will remove this restriction.
Furthermore, all other future updates will become free after this.
How to install LR Enfuse?
Installing the LR Enfuse plugin is easy and can be done in just a few steps.
Just follow the following:
- 1. Download the plugin via the Lightroom’s plugin manager.
- 2. Unzip the file. Then check the called ‘LREnfuse.lrplugin‘ containing the files. If the unzip program didn’t keep this parent directory, then create one and copy the unzipped files into it.
- 3. Move the LREnfuse.lr plugin to a convenient location in your computer.
- 4. Open Lightroom’s plugin manager from the File menu and click the “Add” button.
- 5. Browse the plugin and click “OK” if you are using a Mac or “Add plugin” for Windows.
- 6. Moreover, ensure that you install the Enfuse application on the Configuration panel so it will run smoothly.
Uses of LR/Enfuse in Real Estate Photo Editing
First thing you need to know about this plugin is its versatility. You can pretty much use it in other types of photography, although it is a big help in architectural and real estate photography.
Here are some of the notable uses of this plugin in photo editing real estate images.
Exterior Shots
If you are editing exterior images and would want to achieve a stunning, natural-looking image with depth of field, then use this plugin. With just a few clicks, you can have those appealing final photos.
Interior Shots
Just like the exterior shots, it takes time to get the perfect picture in just one shot. So, why not use blending instead? This can yield more aesthetically looking photos of your rooms, especially the main ones like the dining, living, and bathrooms.
[*]Enfuse isa command-line program used to merge different exposures of the same scene to produce an image that looks very much like a tonemapped image (without the halos[*]) but requires no creation of an HDR image. Therefore it is much simpler to use and allows the creation of very large multiple exposure panoramas.
Enfuse is based on a paper by Tom Mertens, Jan Kautz and Frank Van Reeth: 'Exposure fusion' The implementation was done by Andrew Mihal (developer of Enblend) and the hugin team around Pablo d'Angelo[*]
An extended documentation could be found on Enfuse reference manual[*]
Other programs using Exposure Fusion: tufuse and PTGui[*] Pro
- 1State of development
- 2Description
- 3Usage
- 4External Links
- 4.2GUIs
State of development
On 8 September 2008 the first official version of enfuse has been released together with enblend.Enfuse/enblend can be downloaded from enblend.sourceforge.net. On that site you will find the 3.2 version source code as well as precompiled windows binaries.
Beta (development) releases can be downloaded from
Lr/enfuse Plugin Download
- panorama.dyndns.org (scroll down on that page) for MacOSX
- and also from hugin.panotools.org
Known bugs
(This section needs to be updated)
This is a list of known bugs in the current version as linked above. For a list of bugs in previous versions please refer to an older version of this page
- If contrasty structures are near zenith or nadir in an equirectangular image, there might be an artifact (vortex) in the resulting pano.
- Workaround: use on zenith and nadir images separately and stitch them in the resulting pano afterwards.
- - unknown, whether could be fixed easily
Description
Enfuse merges overlapping images using the Mertens-Kautz-Van Reeth exposure fusion algorithm. This is a quick way to blend differently exposed images into a nice output image, without producing intermediate HDR images that are then tonemapped to a viewable image. This simplified process often works much better than the currently known tonemapping algorithms.
Enfuse can also be used to build extended DOF images, by blending a focus stack.
Basics
The basic idea is that pixels in the input images are weighted according to qualities such as proper exposure, good contrast, and high saturation. These weights determine how much a given pixel will contribute to the final image.
This idea is not quite new. F.e. Ardeshir Goshtasby proposed a technique to select and blend only well exposed blocks and Erik Krause provided a photoshop action to smart mask badly exposed areas. Many such 'DRI' or 'Exposure Blending' solutions exist.
The problem of all this techniques was to find good transitions between the areas taken from differently exposed images. There always was a risk of getting banding or even reversed gradients within areas where the brightness gradually changed.
Enfuse solves this problem by using the multi resolution spline blending technique well known from enblend and smartblend[*] - and it is actually this step which is responsible for the wonderful results. The technique is described detailed for enblend and it works almost the same for enfuse, with the exception that instead of the initial seam line a mask is created according to the given criteria.
Enfuse uses three different criteria to judge the quality of a pixel: Exposure, saturation, and contrast.
- The exposure criteria favors pixels with luminance close to the middle of the range. These pixels are considered better-exposed than those with high or low luminance levels.
- The saturation criteria favors highly-saturated pixels.
- The contrast criteria favors high-contrast pixels. The local gray or color value standard deviation is used as a contrast measure. The Mertens-Kautz-Van Reeth paper suggest using a laplacian filter, but the standard deviation produces much better results for differently focused images.
Adjustments
You can adjust how much importance is given to each criteria by setting the weight parameters on the command line. For example, if you set --wExposure=1.0 and --wSaturation=0.5, Enfuse will favor well-exposed pixels over highly-saturated pixels when blending the source images. The impact of these parameters on the final result will not always be clear. The quality of the result is subject to your artistic interpretation. Playing with the weights may or may not give you a more pleasing result. I encourage you to experiment (perhaps using downsized images for speed).
Enfuse allows each input image to have an alpha channel. By setting the alpha values of pixels to zero, users can manually remove those pixels from consideration when blending. If an input image lacks an alpha channel, Enfuse will print a warning and continue assuming all pixels should be processed for final output. Any alpha value other than zero is interpreted as 'this pixel should should be considered for the final image'.
Usage
The usage below refers to the CVS version of the 21 Dec 2007. Use enfuse as follows:
Input files can be a list of files or a wildcard (on windows f.e. IMG*.jpg for all jpg images that begin with IMG.
Common options
Print information on the available options.
Use exactly this many levels for pyramid blending. A low number trades off quality of results for faster execution time and lower memory usage. The default is to use as many levels as possible given the source image size. However, recent versions don't seem to do that hence it might be useful to specify an arbitrary high number (f.e. -l 20) for best results. If you specify a high number Enfuse may still use a smaller number of levels if the geometry of the images demands it.
Required. Specify the name of the output file.
Verbose output.
Blend around the -180/+180 boundary. Useful for full-360 panoramas. Enfuse currently does not blend the zenith or the nadir, so you may still see some seams in these areas.
Write a compressed output file. Valid values are NONE[*], PACKBITS[*], LZW[*] and DEFLATE[*] for TIFF files, and numbers from 0-100 for JPEG files.
Extended options
Set the block size for Enfuse's image cache. This is the amount of data that Enfuse will move to and from the disk in one go. The default is 2 MiB which should be good for most systems.
Use the CIECAM02 color appearance model for blending colors. Your input TIFF files should have embedded ICC profiles. If no ICC profile is present, Enfuse will assume that image uses the sRGB color space. The difference between using this option and Enfuse's default color blending algorithm is very slight, and will be most noticeable when you need to blend areas of different primary colors together.
Gimp (ver. < 2) and Cinepaint exhibit unusual behaviors when loading images with unassociated alpha channels. Use the -g flag to work around this. With this flag Enfuse will create the output image with the associated alpha tag set, even though the image is really unassociated alpha.
Set the size and position of the output image manually. This is useful when the input images are cropped TIFF files, such as those produced by Nona.
Set the size of Enfuse's image cache. This is the amount of RAM (in megabytes) Enfuse will use for storing image data before swapping to disk. The default is 1024 MB.
Fusion options
W is a number between 0 (no weight) and 1 (full weight)
Sets the relative weight of the well-exposedness criterion. Increasing this weight relative to the others will make well-exposed pixels contribute more to the final output.
Sets the relative weight of high-saturation pixels. Increasing this weight makes pixels with high saturation contribute more to the final output.
Sets the relative weight of high-contrast pixels. Increasing this weight makes pixels with neighboring differently colored pixels contribute more to the final output. Particularly useful for focus stacks.
Mean of the gaussian weighting function (from 0 to 1) for the exposure criterion only. default value: 0.5. This moves the peak of the curve towards the brighter or darker end of the histogram[*]. Higher values pick more brighter pixels from the source images, lower values more darker ones.
Standard deviation of the gaussian weighting function (from 0) for the exposure criterion only. default value: 0.2. Higher values cause a wider curve and more pixels to be taken from a particular image (possibly including under- and over-exposed ones). A lower value causes a narrower curve and less pixels to be taken, possibly resulting in banding.
Force hard blend masks on the finest scale. This avoids averaging of fine details (only), at the expense of increasing the noise. This improves the sharpness of focus stacks considerably.
Expert options
Window size for local contrast analysis. Values larger than 5 might result in increased computation times. Values in the range of 3 to 7 have given good results on focus stacks. The impact on the result quality is not easy to define. You will have to experiment.
Apply grayscale projection OPERATOR, where OPERATOR is one of 'average', 'l-star', 'lightness', 'value', 'luminance', or 'channel-mixer:RED-WEIGHT:GREEN-WEIGHT:BLUE-WEIGHT'. Default: 'average'
Scale on which to look for edges. Positive LCESCALE switches on local contrast enhancement by LCEFACTOR (EDGESCALE, LCESCALE, LCEFACTOR >= 0).
Append '%' to LCESCALE for values relative to EDGESCALE;
append '%' to LCEFACTOR for relative value. Defaults: 0:0:0
Minimum CURVATURE for an edge to qualify. Append '%' for relative values. Default: 0.
Output intermediate images for debugging.
External Links
Command line
Another implementation of the enfuse algorithm is TuFuse from Max Lyons, which features automatic DOF fusion (from a focus stack) and exposure fusion in one go as well as some additional options: http://www.tawbaware.com/tufuse.htm (freeware, windows only)
GUIs
enfuse has triggered the development of some GUIs.
Multi platform
- The recent release of hugin has integrate enfuse fully. Get it from http://hugin.sourceforge.net (open source).
- PTGui[*] Pro since version 7.7 has a built in image fusion tool which features the exposure criterion only but has extended adjustment possibilities.
- LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plugin for blending exposures directly from within Lightroom using Enfuse. It works on Mac and PC. Get it from http://photographers-toolbox.com/products/lrenfuse.php
Linux
- KImageFuser by Harry van der Wolf is an enfuse/align_image_stack Gui for Linux (free GPL V3). It has a preview function and batch options. It is written in the graphical script environment kommander and can run on any linux platform. Dependencies are: kdewebdev-3.5.9 or newer, enfuse, align_image_stack (from Hugin), convert (ImageMagick). Not a dependendency but highly recommended: Exiftool to be able to copy all relevant exif data (ImageDescription, Make, Model, Artist, WhitePoint, Copyright, GPS:all, DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, UserComment, ColorSpace, OwnerName, SerialNumber, all IPTC, all JFIF, XResolution, YResolution, ResolutionUnit, Lens, FocalLengthIn35mmFormat and FocalLength) to the new image. All dependencies are available in the main linux distributions. Note also that at least one KDE theme should be available like e.g. the famous (and default) 'bluecurve' theme. KImageFuser has also been added to the Hugin svn in it's own project KImageFuser tree.
- digiKam can use enfuse to blend bracketed images.
Windows
- The droplets by Erik Krause are contained in the hugin windows package from http://hugin.sourceforge.net and installed ready to use. A group of image files or an entire folder can be dragged and dropped on a droplet. In case of a folder the user can specify the number of images in a bracketed series, hence multiple series can be enfused in one go. The droplets copy relevant EXIF data to the result image such that camera and lens data isn't lost f.e. for subsequent stitching. Another droplet version does automatic alignment in order to allow for handheld bracketed series. (open source)
- EnfuseGUI by Ingemar Bergmark is a graphical user interface (free).
- TuFuse Pro by Max Lyons is a nice graphical user interface to his own tufuse free command line application (commercial)
- Tufusion is a free GUI for Max Lyons' tufuse, developed by TuFuse forum user 'entropy'. It's not as sophisticated as TuFuse Pro, but it surely makes life a lot easier, compared to using the command line application.
Mac OSX
- Bracketeer (commercial) by Brian Greenstone is a graphical user interface with preview function for OS X 10.4 and higher.
- EnfuseGUI (donationware) by Ingemar Bergmark is a graphical user interface for OS X 10.4 and higher.
Lr Enfuse Plugin
- ImageFuser (Open Source) by Harry van der Wolf is a graphical user interface for enfuse and align_image_stack with preview function for OS X 10.4 and higher.
Lr Enfuse Plugin Crack
- XFuse (free) by Kevin Kratzke is a graphical user interface that allows for batch processing and works on OS X 10.4 and higher. Development of this application is discontinued, last downloadable version is 0.5 as of Feb. 8, 2008.