This “update mpreview and metadata”, was that in RC or your developer?
Since it eventually DOES show your changes, are you still sure it’s the JPG or could it really be the RAW data now?
With my Fuji RAWs, it doesn’'t seem to work at all, even though I have the codec installed - it just stays at the first hugely pixelated previews and the blue dots on top of the 2D windows never stop cycling…
I did some testing. You probably want to watch this at 2 times play back.
I’ll have a part 2 tomorrow
Johnathan BTW about the mixed white balance. You could just do it the way most movies do. What I have come to do and what most “cinematic” productions do is just use a white balance of 5500 K. As a photographer and videographer I use this all the time and it looks good and natural to the eye.
Here is an example of extreme mixed lighting all shot at 5500K for a church. Notice how the drone and slow motion footage don’t throw you off even though its not properly white balanced at all.
https://youtu.be/POgwraWx5aU?t=1m12s
(Edit: To elabrorate on this, the way it was explained to me was "You can mess around on trying to get it perfect in every frame and it will NEVER look right, or you can use daylight WB that your eyes are most used to and let them do the correction.)
Raw workflow testing part2
Summary:
Built in previews in raw file straight from camera are bad ( at the very least not ideal )
Raw codecs are for generating thumbnails and giving a quick preview of the file, but in no way actually read the raw data. It’s just a jpg baked into the raw in most cases, for the purpose of a quick preview. ( This is the method Reality Capture is using to read said raw files )
Lightroom converted DNG’s are essentially the same thing as a full quality jpg if you baked in full quality jpgs. Watch part one for details.
Tiffs are probably not worth the time or space they take up. I might test PNG as they are technically lossless, but not today I’m tired of recording.
Thanks Steven for these videos, we now have more informations about how RC handles the raw files - so I even suppose that RC is actually relying on the installed driver : it may be possible that we have different results with another set of codec installed. But to be sure, maybe this is better to stick to JPGs (or TIFFs, I know they are huge, but maybe with fast drives it could speed up the image readings ?) generated outside RC.
About PNGs, according to my tests on features-rich images (the images that we love in photogrammetry), you do not save much space (comparing to TIFFs), so I don’t think this is worth it.
About the 5500K white balance for all shoots, I eventually came to the same conclusion (my conclusion was : instead of measuring white balance or switching between sunny, cloudy and shadows preset (and make editing complicated after), let’s stay on the middle preset (cloudy) that should be a all-around preset for most cases). Actually I think that depending on the body, 5500k is in between “sunny” and “cloudy”… I will test 5500K for my next capture, thanks for the information ! Of course I think that does not prevent us to get some color checkers, just in case…
We could also try to capture the color temperature coming / white balance from all directions with a sphere diffuse gray probe I guess for large environments captures. Anybody has some experience of this ? This could then be used, after a first alignment, to process the raw pictures (using the xmp datas that contain images orientations)… how does it sounds ?
And about the flash, I did some tests with a ring flash but found that it kills too much of the lighting (of course that is what we want) of the scene. So for now I am sticking to “natural” light shootings. But I will test the ceiling bouncing flash.
Götz, I tried the 16 bits tiffs, but there is not really any high dynamics here, I think mostly because the input images are only processed as 8 bits without taking the exposure (EXIF) into account. So yes, maybe there is some 8 bits blending to 16 bits result that make it gain a little dynamic, but no real HDR here I am afraid. Can someone from Capturing Reality confirm ?
Here again, if Capturing Reality has no time to investigate this area of high dynamic range texturing, we could maybe use the XMP metadata and the rectified images to texture the unwraped model outside of RC… I don’t know how complicated this would be… I think I will give it a try.
Jonathan,
I believe that you are asking about an incident light meter. I don’t know if it you give you the results your looking for as it would only measure at one spot ( it would give you one temp or the other, or somewhere in the middle ) there is something called the flambient ( flash ambient ) method I think might work better for you. You shoot 2 frames, one with flash and a high shutter speed (to kill all ambient light and to have the “most” correct color) then you the shoot a pure ambient exposure. In photoshop you open them in 2 layers and change the blending option, depending one the one on top, to color ( the flash one) or luminance (from the ambient one). This will give you the ambient glows of lights and windows, shadows, streams of light coming through a window, while having the whole scene color balanced. I use this in realestate photography and learned it from youtube.
Can we PM on this platform? I don’t see a way.
Jonathan,
or anyone with experience
I have some questions about 3d modeling. My profession is photography, and my hobby is computers. When it comes to modeling software and game engines like unity and blender I’m overwhelmed. I would love to be able fix models from this much like I would touch up photos in Photoshop but cant find good educational material ( really just don’t know where to start ). the most I’ve done is bring a model into VR by following
I cant afford zbrush at $900 or Maya for $150/month or $1500/Yr.
I don’t want to develop games, just touch up my models.
Can you recommend any software or tutorials?
No this is not an incident light meter, this is a gray diffuse sphere probe that you shoot and that gives you the incident light going from all the directions around the sphere (except just behind but if your lens is long enough, this will be a small part). So the idea would be to shoot this probe to get the incident color temperature depending on the direction, and then use this to correct the pictures, depending on the orientation of subject and/or camera.
I would recommend MeshLab (open source and free), Blender (open source and free) and Unity3D engine (there is a free license). MeshLab works very well with RC, and Blender is hard to learn but works very well for baking.
Hey Steven,
thank you very much for those two awesome videos!
I would say you proved it beyond reasonable doubt… 
Thanks! I’m glad if they helped anyone. I’m not used to being in front of the camera/mic myself and find it uncomfortable to say the least. Maybe I should do a whole series on RC. I don’t expect or want to reach a large audience, but I think it would be a good way to have a discussion on how RC works, since the reading material is very limited to the most generic instructions. Just like with these videos I forced myself to learn I would also learn from future projects.
Haha, and I though you do those vids all the time!
Not at all noticable that you’re uncomfortable, on the contrary, very confident and routined.
I wouldn’t even know where to start…
Are you a Hobbyist or Pro? The interrupting customer suggests the latter…
Unfortunately, there is no PM function on this bare bones forum (has been often criticised).
So to not be too public, we could maybe continue by mail? Anybody who’s interested can find my details with my name on a search engine…
I’m a photographer, I volunteer as videographer at church, and this is a hobby I do. I find the tech fascinating. Right at this moment I’m shooting my neighborhood block maybe I’ll document my process and put it in a new post.
Jonathan this might help with you lighting situation.
https://80.lv/articles/full-photogrammetry-guide-for-3d-artists/