Bracketing Mass Amounts of pictures (5 at a time). Can I do this quickly?

[brandenc33214844]

I have thousands of photos that I took bracketed shots of (5 different exposures). To bracket these images I am selecting 5 and merging them in light room. Is there a way to do this that faster than going through each set 5 at a time and merging them? With thousands of photos it'll take me hours to get through them all. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[gary_sc · Accepted solution]

Sure, 

First thing is to select all images in that folder, right-click and go to Stacking bottom of the Stacking option is "Stack by Capture time..." I take my images automated so no image is slower than a second apart, I run that and everything is stacked.

Then I go to the first stack and run that as a separate item. there is a checkbox in that window that says "AutoStack." Check that and go finish the image. There is also an option there to deghoast the image. If you have a lot of these, than you may be stuck and have to do them one-by-one. If not than turn that off. Go ahead and finish that image, let it process.

I'm on a Mac so my key command for doing an HDR is Command-h. If you do a "Shift-Command-h," that's called a headless command and that window you just dealt with doesn't come up. So now you can shift-click or Command-click on all of the already stacked images, press "Shift-Command-h" and it will do them all while you do other things.

Just out of curiosity, how many stops are you using for your 5 images? Idealy, you need 2 stops between each image (where the shutter speed is the thing that changes, not the f-stop). You gain NOTHING when you have one stop between images. So, if you do have 1 stop between images, (-2, -1, 0, 1, 2), than you can toss the -1 & 1 stop images and there will be NO noticable change or beneift or loss to your image. What you do lose is a lot of wasted space on your hard drive. If you take raw images, you only need the -2 & 2 image, you do not even need the 0 image.

So why is this? Think of the dynamic range of an image is (say) 30" wide. If you are using jpg images, their dynamic range is about 12". To measure 30 images, you need three 12" rulers. But raw images have 16" inches of dynamic range so it only take two of them to measure the same distance.

That notwithstanding I usually do take all three shots (or 5 (or even 7) shots if I'm in a building with significantly greater dynamic range) because sometimes there's information in those shots I might want to draw upon. 

Anyhow, go and play, enjoy, I hope you like your images.

[ehagemann]

I'm back to the orignal question, is there no way to "stack by N" -- with a directory fill of files in sets of 3 (-2EV, 0,  +2EV) it seems simple enough to just stack by 3 without having to worry about time between shots.  The problem with stack by time is that the time between stacks needs to be more than the time of the longest exposure.  For example, if I am doing a (-2,0,2) sequece where exposure time is at 0EV is 4 sec the three shots are 1 sec, 4sec and 16sec.  I often take two sequences  back to back to make sure I captured the scene (camera motion etc) and so would like to take the next sequence right after the first is captured.  However,  to make auto stack by time work I would need to wait > 16 seconds between sequences.