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So for a long time it has annoyed the crap out of me that there is no way to automate the HDR toning process in photoshop (for the purpose of timelapse, etc.). Searching the internet, pretty much all you find is people telling you to use some other software to do it like photomatix. Well I don't freakin' want to buy another piece of software when I've already dropped a boat load on photoshop and it should, at least in theory, be able to do this.

After scraping bits of scripts together I found from across the internet and single stepping through the MergeToHDR.jsx script built into photoshop to figure out how it works, I finally have come up with a script that can do this.

https://github.com/davidmilligan/PhotoshopBatchHDR/blob/master/Batch%20HDR.jsx

Guide on how to use this script:

https://github.com/davidmilligan/PhotoshopBatchHDR/wiki

Being a C++/C# developer by day, non-strongly-typed languages like javascript annoy the hell out me, and the poor documentation and crappy IDE of ExtendScript only make matters worse. So if anyone with more javascript/adobe scripting experience would like to help me polish this script up, that would be great.

Modify the 'numberOfBrackets' variable to tell the script how many brackets are in each shot, the MergeToHDR script will automatically determine which is which (+EV, - EV, etc) so the bracket order doesn't matter just as long as you always take the same number of brackets for each shot.

The script is currently not able load individual raw files for HDR toning (i.e. numberOfBrackets = 1) which is something I'd like to be able to do since even a single exposure raw file is 14bit which is higher dynamic range that an 8 bit screen, and allow HDR time lapses without as many actuations. I don't really know how to raw files; you have to specify a bunch of options when you try to open a raw file, and I don't really know what they should be. The MergeToHDR script will load raw files but it requires a minimum of 2 files so it wont work with individual files, and I can't really figure out what it's doing to load raw files (or at least I haven't tried really hard to figure it out yet).

Once I figure out how to load single RAW files I think this script could also be very useful for those doing RAW video, as it would provide a way to do HDR toning effects on RAW video footage.

I'd also like to figure out a way to avoid hard coding the toning settings in the script, perhaps reverse engineer the HDR preset file format and have the script load a preset file and use the values in that.

Also, I'm using photoshop CC, so I'm not sure if it works on earlier versions, but it should, as I don't think adobe has changed any of the HDR stuff in a while.

For a fast CF card, a USB 3.0 card reader is going to be significantly faster than trying to use the camera as a reader (I'm fairly certain all of the ML supported camera models are only USB 2.0). My cameras only have SD cards but it is still faster for me to copy files with an external reader.

Secondly, I doubt it's possible. I imagine the USB controller on the camera is implemented in hardware and there is no way it's operation can be modified, but I don't know. Any devs out there care to shed some light? How much is known about the USB controller? However, if it is possible that the USB controller can be reprogrammed, I could see a lot of other potential uses such as getting the camera to show up as generic A/V device so that it can be used as a webcam or be controlled by software other than the canon EOS utility.

Still having problems with intervalometer and bulb exposure. The older build I was using from back in Apr just simply crashed when you tried to do a bulb override + intervalometer, I think I saw that others had reported this. I just recently put the Jul31 nightly on there and it no longer crashes, the only problem is that after the first shot it goes from being set on BULB back to 30", and so none of the subsequent pictures use the bulb override amount, they simply are 30 seconds.

I have been meaning to get around trying out the RAW video on my 60Da. Thanks to sequestration I don't "have" to work today, so I downloaded the latest nightly and fired it up. My results seem pretty inline with what everyone else has been getting from what I've read on this thread:

1728x972 - 134 frames @24fps
1280x720 - 361 frames @24fps
960x540 - 1135 frames @24fps

(Lexar Platinum II 32 GB 200x class 10)

I'll have to say the 720p is stunning and 361 frames is *almost* useable, certainly blows 1080p H.264 out of the water.

I was just curious so I tried out 60fps, which did not work at all, almost every frame was screwed up. I'm guessing that no one has really messed with 60fps, just trying to get the max out of 24fps, and understandably so.

The workflow was also way easier than I expected. I used RAWMagic to convert to CinemaDNG and then imported the DNGs directly into After Effects. That's pretty much only one extra step than my typical workflow.

First off, kudos to you guys for making such a wonderful piece of software. I've been using ML for about 3 months now and I don't know what I would do without it. It makes my cameras 10x more useful.

As an astrophotographer who shoots a lot in very low light and often with manual focus only optics (such as a telescope). I would find it very helpful if ML could somehow assist me in achieving focus. Focusing with a telescope is a long, arduous, trial and error process. I think it could be sped up and accuracy improved with the help of ML. Here's basically what I do to get focus: take an exposure with the shortest duration that I can and still get enough image to judge focus (usually at least several seconds, if I'm photographing something really faint could be as long as 30s, also with the 2 sec timer and mirror lockup so I don't get any shaking). Then move the focus a little and take another picture and so on and so forth until I feel like I can't get it any better.

So here's my request: a manual focus assistant. I takes an image and analyzes focus and then says to you "move the focus" then it takes another, compares to the previous and says either "keep going", "no that's worse go the other direction", or "that's as good as your going to get".

I think this is simple enough it could almost be accomplished with a picoc script. I looked at the API a while back, but I don't really remember if there were sufficient focus checking functions to accomplish this. The other issue would be that analyzing focus in an image that is mostly a star field is a bit different from a "normal" subject (though theoretically much easier since you just have lots of little point sources of light you can check)

The second part of this would be an automatic mode for lenses that are AF but there is not enough light available for AF. It would basically do the same thing except fully automatically, then it would lock the AF, or just tell the user to switch the lens to MF so the camera doesn't try to AF on the next shot and screw it up.

Thanks!
David