Enfuse for time lapses - tutorial

July 2016 (so you know how long ago this was made)

Applies only to Windows users!

HDR time-lapse

So it's great to get a nice "HDR" result for one triplet, but now we have 300 quintuplets in a time-lapse to process! Even with saved settings, there are few people who have the patience to do this 300 times, and again for the next time lapse. Hang on! This is what computers are good at! One free option is a wrapper .bat script developed by Erik Krause. It's called a droplet because you drag and drop a group of image files or an entire folder onto the droplet icon

Triplet? Could be a doublet, could be a quad or even quint of pictures in the bracket. For Moon over city, I was once limited to 3 exposures if I wanted a new set every 5 seconds and still be able to see what's on the viewscreen. With Magic Lantern software loaded into my Canon, there is a much greater range of choice, and now I regularly shoot a bracket of 6 exposures 2EV apart, every 5 seconds. This adds up to 5Gig of images for a 2-hour session! Oh, and at the moment I shoot 5184x3456 in JPG, because the camera cannot download raw fast enough.

Here's the EnfuseGUI workflow:

1. Choose two representative bracket sets in the sequence; the parameters you end up with will apply to all others later
2. Use EnfuseGUI to play around and determine the enfusing parameters
3. Run a full enfuse and note the elapsed time to estimate how long it will take to do the whole folder.
4. Clear the file list to start fresh
5. Select all the images in the folder, drag them onto the EnfuseGUI window
6. Double check that it is the correct number of images per bracket
7. Let it run overnight or while you are at work.

Here's the droplet workflow:

1. Choose two representative bracket sets in the sequence; the parameters you end up with will apply to all others later
2. Use EnfuseGUI to play around and determine the enfusing parameters
3. Edit the file "enfuse_droplet.bat" to modify the enfuse parameters (modify for each time lapse!)
4. Drag & drop the folder of images onto the enfuse_droplet shortcut
5. Enter number of images in each bracket/stack
6. Let it run!

Okay, so we first need to do a one-time set up for step 3 above:

1. Download Hugin from main page or sourceforge latest & install, make sure you install (check yes to) all the related tools. Mine ended up here: C:\Program Files\Hugin
2. Copy the bin folder from C:\Program Files\Hugin\bin to say C:\Enfuse_bin (to avoid admin rights problems with each use). You don't need all the stuff in there, but no harm leaving it.
3. Copy the Enfuse droplet shortcut to your desktop (or another folder that you open when you start your image processing run)
4. Right-click, choose properties and edit if need be to make the target and Start directories to your new folder