LR/Enfuse has seen several major improvements over its lifetime, including the ability to automatically align images that show a slight shift, the ability to preserve the image metadata (normally lost when using Enfuse) and, after great demand, the ability to batch process an entire shoot by grouping all the photos that will form a single image. 3) Image Composites Entire books have been written about creating image composites in Photoshop, and the LR/Enfuse plugin can’t begin to approach that. For example, there’s no masking feature per se and no layers, either in Lightroom or in the LR/Enfuse plugin (there is a Layers plugin for Lightroom from On One Software, but I haven’t yet tried it). See full list on tuxoche.com.
Hi gang – and howdy from Charlotte, North Carolina (here for my seminar today). So, last week I had Real Estate photographer Thomas Grubba as my guest on “The Grid” (our life weekly talk show for photographers), and he was talking about how he uses a Lightroom plug-in called:
“Enfuse”
It’s from a developer in the UK, and it’s what Thomas uses to take his bracketed real estate photography images and merge them into a single image with a realistic look. He was really raving about it, so I tried it myself and it’s pretty amazing (most of the time). Best of all, it’s “Donationware” (there’s no set price – you give what you want to the developer).
Here’s a few quick results (no toning was done to any of these – just the initial merge, so you can do a lot to these examples. The first one will be Lightroom’s built-in “Merge to HDR” followed by the Enfuse plug-in.
Note: Ignore the ghosting – I didn’t address it in any of these examples.
Above:Lightroom’s Merge to HDR feature
Above:Same images merged using the “Enfuse” plug-in
Above:The same image with Lightroom Merge to HDR but with the AUTO TONE turned on.
Above:The Enfuse image with Auto Tone added.
Above:Lightroom’s Merge to HDR version.
Above:the same images merged in “Enfuse”
Above: Here’s what the plug-in looks like when it opens in Lightroom. 4 tabs along the top with different options for merging.
Most of the time, I seem to like the results from Enfuse better than Lightroom’s built-in (which I’ve been quite fond of, so that’s saying something), but there were a couple of images I merged where I liked the Lightroom native version better, but not many.
Thomas recommended added +20 Clarity and +10 Contrast two your HDR bracketed images before you Enfuse them, and he’s right — I think it produces a better result.
The only downside I’ve experienced thus far is that it’s quite a bit slower than Lightroom’s Merge to HDR, so you wait longer to see your result, especially with larger brackets of 5 or 7 images. Outside of that, it’s a peach.
Here’s a link to download Enfuse from the developer (be generous). 🙂
Hope you found that helpful.
One more thing…
In other news: Registration for the Photoshop World Orlando 2017 Conference officially opens today. You can read more about it on my blog at scottkelby.com or go to photoshopworld.com
I look forward to meeting a bunch of you here today! 🙂
Best,
-Scott