Gosh, now I've posted it, I've already decided that I'm going to re-develop the images that make the Pano - probably pull them down a tad maybe .33 or .66 ev or so.

Very nice! How many is that put together, and what software did you use?

thanks

In this particular version of the Pano, I used 5 shots with 5 exposures each (although I could have used 4, because I cropped out one of them)

IDC to batch develop
I used IDC to batch develop each individual shot to have about five exposures (-0.67ev, 0ev, +0.67ev, +1.33ev +2.00ev). Why so many? Because I found that HDRs look too harsh if I only use 3 exposures. I found that five or more exposures produce a smoother transition between shadows and highlights in an HDR. I discovered that if you are pixel peeping, you can still see benefits by adding additional exposures to up to about 10 exposures. However, when I realize normal people aren't going to be pixel peeping at my images, I didn't feel as compelled to blend additional exposures.

Tufuse to blend exposures
After creating the individual exposures in IDC, I blended them with Tufuse. I set Tufuse to consider contrast, saturation, and exposure when it was determining how to blend the images. In most cases if you just set Tufuse to "auto", if would result in a very similar result.

I would dare to say, you might not have realized that this was an HDR if I hadn't told you. However, the WTC site at the bottom and the details of the buildings would have been too dark in an exposure to show the sky. Or the sky would have been over exposed to show the details in the buildings and WTC site. However, I can't tell anymore - I've been staring at this too long. **** Would you have known this was an HDR shot?

PTAssembler to stitch
Then I used PTAssembler to blend the photos into a single image. This was completely automatic since I used the free autopano plug in !! I also used the free smartblend plug-in.

It should be noted that PTAssembler uses Tufuse as a plug-in, too. However, since I am learning about Tufuse, I decided to do this manually. Otherwise, I could have automatically produced the entire thing in PTAssembler & IDC.

- - - - - -

Also, here is an interesting discovery for me.
For each original shot, I took multiple images with different settings and exposures. However, I noticed that blending those original images didn't produce any better HDR than blending the different exposures that came from IDC. That is, I photographed 1 spot with 3 or 4 different settings, swiveled the the camera and repeated. Blending those original 3 or 4 images didn't make any improvement over blending 1 photograph that was developed/post processed to produce five different exposures.

I wished I had time to climb up one of the skyscrapers this past weekend. Too much to do in 2 days. I have the urge to sneak back for some nighttime shots. Hopefully this summer.

Very nice picture b shaw!! I like it a lot.

Ron