A "Blending" Mode???

[Joe G.]

This article describes how bracketed exposures can be blended to bring in the underexposed shadows and the overexposed highlights into something better than either (increase dynamic range).

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml

Can Red do something similar as a "mode" of image capture?

Instead of 1 frame at 24fps, what about 2 frames at 48fps, combined to form 1 frame out of the 2 bracketed exposure frames?

The first of the pair would be under, the second would be over. This would rapidly toggle back and forth in real time.

It could give brand new looks to the images that no one has seen before.

This is something that could be experimented with in many ways. The obvious, simple way would be to change the shutter speed very rapidly, as changing aperture is mechanical and relies upon the lense. Anyone have any experience with attempting this?

 

[Cail Young]

The first of the pair would be under, the second would be over. This would rapidly toggle back and forth in real time.

This only works if there is very little motion; as anything that's moved in the frame will be in a different place (and have a different amount of blur!) in the two exposures.

 

[Mark Pugh]

This only works if there is very little motion; as anything that's moved in the frame will be in a different place (and have a different amount of blur!) in the two exposures.

If the second (highlight recovery) frame was of a much shorter exposure (to gain the highlights), and was taken right after the primary frame, the additional motion blur wouldn't be too annoying, or too out of sync - you'd notice the highlights would have a bit less motion blur, perhaps. Might be ok for lots of shots. Might be too much processing...

 

[Pawel Achtel]

It's HDR, essentially. Whilst in some casesthis would not work due to offset in motion blur, I can see that more often than not it would be an extremely useful feature.

 

[Spike Baumann]

I always thought it would be cool to have 2 sensors where one would record the lower ends of DR and the other going for the higlights and then get merged together to get an HDRI file. One day...

 

[Paris Remillard]

Or just an oversampled, say 8K for 4K, bayer filtered single sensor with every other photosite being ND'd might work. Or I wonder if it would be possible to apply gain to different photosites individually, instead of the ND. That way one could dial in the amount of latitude needed. So for certain shots where the extra latitude wasn't needed, you could shoot full rez. And if more latitude is needed, you switch to half rez HDR mode. But I suppose that a lot of the functionality of the second option can be done in post by combining different outputs from the same RAW file and tone mapping. I don't know... just talking out of my butt...