Most of the time I'm too lazy to adjust colors in my photos, so I wrote a script that does this exactly the way I want. It gets roughly 80-90% of pics just right for my taste; for the others I can do manual adjustments.
The script is a few months old, so it was fine-tuned over the time. It's similar to the "Post Deflicker" feature from ML, but optimized for regular photos, not for timelapse.
What it does:
- applies exposure compensation to all photos (so the end result looks consistent)
- performs shadow and highlight recovery, with the "HDR from a single RAW" tonemapping trick and enfuse
Download:
uniform_exposure.py or browse the
Mercurial repository.
Usage: look in the comments. There are no command-line params; edit the script to tweak stuff.
Dependencies: python, numpy, dcraw, ufraw, enfuse and ImageMagick.
Sample photo developed with the script, from
this DNG, without any post-processing after running the script:
How I've got that DNG, I'll tell you later these days.
Caveats:
- By default it develops at half-res, for speed. To use full resolution, set --shrink=1 instead of 2.
- I use a modified ufraw, so you may not get exactly the same result for this sample DNG.
- I didn't try it for timelapse. It may flicker a bit more than ML post deflicker, but you can try it.
- Don't expect it to be a speed demon. It will spend several seconds on a raw file. So, first select your shots that you want to keep, then fire the script and let it crunch your pics.
- For Windows,
see this step-by-step guide.
Tips & tricks:
- To re-develop a picture with different settings, just delete that jpeg and run the script again.
- You can use any kind of raw files recognized by dcraw (not just Canon). I've tried only CR2 and DNG.
You can post sample pics here, I'd like to see how well it works for you.
Enjoy!
