However, despite the high dynamic range of the current professional Nikon bodies as recorded in NEF, there may be better rendition if a HDR technique (such as provided by the HDR bracketing regimen of the Z9) is used. I also have used it with a fisheye to get a pseudo-pano crop, particularly for high dynamic range subjects (sunsets over a dark land/seascape). With the D850 and Z9, I too use the “dark recovery” of PL that has improved with the most recent release of PL6E complete. There’s no ‘Deep Prime’ for the export of the processed TIFF files, of course, but the final image probably won’t need it. Clear-View, exposure-values and saturation/vibrance, gives a far superior result. In any case, it’s important, in my view, to use the least amount of toning (or ‘tonal compression’) possible in any of these external programs (I use Photomatix ‘neutral’ setting), because toning the resulting TIFF in DXO, especially using theTone Curve and DXO-masks for e.g. Finally, for HDR panoramas (or even single HDR images) PT-GUI is very reliable, ‘automatically’ detecting which images to fuse and which groups to stitch for the pano. I don’t use the NIK suite but HDR-Effects has its fans. I use PhotoMatix but Easy-HDR will also do a good job. There are several HDR programs that will do that on the Mac. I use an external fusion program that accepts TIFFs (or even DNGs) passed directly by DXO and that will re-export the resulting image directly to DXO for final toning. The export of a 5-image exposure bracket for HDR fusion takes about 30 seconds on my iMac (Intel, 2019). So I export TIFFs from DXO (using CMD-J on the Mac) after setting the profile (“camera natural” or “camera muted”), setting the white balance, applying optical corrections and “Deep Prime” processing (I use a preset that does all of these). ![]() I think that DXO-PL exported DNGs merely encapsulate TIFF files (or equivalent bitmaps) with added overhead. ![]() Finally (I don’t mean to be disagreeable), I find DNG an irrelevant format for external processing. Instead, you have to save the intermediate files somewhere and then load them into AP using its import dialog. But I find AP awkward compared with alternatives mainly because you can’t “pass” intermediate images directly to AP for HDR or Pano merging, as far as I know. I agree that Affinity Photo does a fine job on the exposure-fusion step. Export to DNG and pass those files to Affinity.
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