Duck eggs are not supposed to be this big

Yes, the sea really is that colour

© 2016 Bill Lim. All rights reserved.

The evening ocean breeze dragging the fog over the coastal range.

Camera details:

• Olympus E-30

• Zuiko Digital 70-300mm f 4.0/5.6 lens

• Polarizing filter

• Save to Olympus RAW (ORF)

• Panorama stitched from seven images.

Workflow

• rawtherapee v4.2 to "develop" seven RAW ORF (Olympus RAW) images. For each of the seven adjust their exposure to -0.5ev, 0.0ev, and +0.5ev. Save each exposure to a 16-bit TIFF for a total of 21 TIFF images (7 images x 3 exposures = 21).

• enfuse v4.1.2 to blend each image's exposure stack. I.e. (en)fuse the -0.5ev, 0.0ev, and +0.5ev images into a single 16-bit TIFF image. In the end there will be a panorama stitched (next step) from the seven (en)fused TIFF images.

• hugin v2016.0 to stitch a equirectangular panini projected panorama image from the seven enfused 16-bit TIFFs. Save the panorama as a 16-bit TIFF image.

• Perform noise reduction with Noise Ninja.†

• Back to rawtherapee v4.2 to boost constrast, increase saturation, and lastly down-scale and save as TIFF image.

• gimp v2.8.10 to add a copyright string to the image. Save image to JPEG.

• Apply output sharpening with Focus Magic.†

• exiftool v9.46 to copy the .ORF EXIF tags back into the final JPEG. And to set other tags, e.g. keywords.

• digikam v3.5.0 to geotag image (using its GPS track log time-correlation feature).

• Linux Kubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).

• MSI GT683 laptop with an Intel i7-2630QM Quad-core 2.0GHz processor and w/16GB RAM.

† Noise Ninja and Focus Magic are Windows applications. In order to run them on Linux they are executed via WINE v1.6.2.