Hello,

Andrew Mihal (developer of enblend) and the hugin development team
around Pablo d'Angelo have a christmas present for the panorama
community: enfuse

The program uses the multi resolution spline blending technique known
from enblend to fusion (hence the name) a stack of exposure bracketed
images - not to HDR but to a exposure blended LDR result.

I tested it on some cases and it yielded results wich are the closest
to perfect I ever saw. Even the 17 EV lamp example from my page
http://www.erik-krause.de/blending which no recent tonemapper was
able to process satisfactorily looks really great:
http://www.erik-krause.de/lamp_enfuse.jpg

And the best is: this runs fully automatic, without need to tweak a
load of settings. The syntax is similar to enblend, hence it might be
possible to use one of the enblend GUIs:
http://wiki.panotools.org/Enblend_Front_End or even PTGui if you
specify enfuse instead of enblend or smartblend in the Options
-> Plugins menu (don't forget to set it back, since enfuse is *no*
panorama blender).

Enfuse is part of the enblend 3.1 pre release. Hence be warned: There
still might be bugs - this is for testing only. Please read the
README and the NEWS file from the ZIP before. Please report any bugs
or oddities here or better on the hugin-ptx list at
http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx

Enblend 3.1 reports are welcome, too!

Enfuse f.e. shuts down if it is called with wrong parameters. Here is
a list (output of enfuse if called without parameters):

Usage: enfuse [options] -o OUTPUT INPUTS

Common options:
  -h                Print this help message
  -l number         Number of levels to use (1 to 29)
  -o filename       Write output to file
  -v                Verbose
  -w                Blend across -180/+180 boundary
  --compression=COMP Set compression of the output image.
                    Valid values for compression are:
                    For TIFF files: LZW, DEFLATE
                    For JPEG files: 0-100

Extended options:
  -b kilobytes      Image cache block size (default=2MiB)
  -c                Use CIECAM02 to blend colors
  -g                Associated alpha hack for Gimp (ver. < 2) and
                    Cinepaint
  -f WIDTHxHEIGHT+x0+y0   Manually set the size and position of the
                          output image.
                          Useful for cropped and shifted input TIFF
                          images, such as those produced by Nona.

  -m megabytes      Use this much memory before going to disk
                    (default=1GiB)

Fusion options:
  --wExposure       Weight given to well-exposed pixels.
  --wContrast       Weight given to high-contrast pixels
                    (unimplemented).
  --wSaturation     Weight given to highly-saturated pixels
                    (unimplemented).

The Fusion options parameters have no effect so far since only
--wExposure is implemented and hence default. -c works only if the
source images contain a color profile.

Ok, did you read all? Then for the link (currently only Windows
version):

http://hugin.panotools.org/testing/enblend/enblend-3.1_win32_pre2.zip

best regards and merry christmas.

--
Erik Krause
Offenburger Str. 33
79108 Freiburg