Bracketed pictures are commonly taken to enhance the dynamic range (and sometimes the sharpness) of a photographic scene. The former type of bracketing is also known as exposure bracketing, and is what we will be dealing with in this article. There are many software products offering this functionality, including but not limited to Hugin, digiKam and Adobe Photoshop. A major drawback of these programs, however, is that they are designed mainly for graphical interface use; and will have you click through their interface for every set of bracketed images you wish to stack. Here we present a rapid and easily-batchable way to stack your exposure bracketed images via a one-liner from the command line.

Basic Function

The most basic steps needed to stack bracketed shots are:

• Aligning the images - this could be skipped for pictures shot with high-end tripods, but is still recommended.
• Fusing the aligned shots - this is pretty much the core operation when dealing with bracketed shots.

More advanced features (which are arguably better implemented further downstream in the image processing workflow) include:

• Cropping to rectangular area - raw files on certain camera/lens combinations do not represent a perfectly rectangular section of the scene.
• Lens distortion correction - some lenses may create slightly “billowed” or “embossed” images (correcting this may also help with the previous point).
• Tone mapping - this is used to enhance the HDR appearance in limited dynamic range regimens; some scripts made for stacking bracketed shots include this functionality - though it is really best done in the post-processing phase.

The stackHDR Script

The Hugin software package may in itself be geared towards graphical interface use, yet it ships with a number of functions that can be used from the command line to automate the basic photo processing steps:

• align_image_stack - as the name says, this aligns the images
• enfuse - this fuses the images

Hugin, sadly, cannot load RAW files, and therefore (in order to keep the 16bit dynamic range) we need to convert the files to TIFF. This is best done in batch with the ufraw-batch command from UFRaw.

The stackHDR script (which is available via the aforementioned GitHub link) is based on earlier efforts by Edu Perez, which have also lead to at least one other offshoot. Sadly, however, both these solutions are unmaintained at least as of 2011.

The improvements which stackHDR brings are:

• Version tracking via Git
• Longer maintenance timespan via GitHub contributors
• More verbose output
• Clean-run function (which removes all logs and original files) for batch usage
• Lighter dependency spectrum (not requiring the less widely-ported Pfstools)

Notable omissions of our script include:

• No .hdr format output
• No tone mapping functionality