easyHDR [commercial]

[Tami]

[url=\"http://www.easyhdr.com/\"][b]easyHDR[/b][/url]

[url=\"http://www.easyhdr.com/purchase.php\"]Single user license[/url] - €19.00 (about $25-26 USD)

The [url=\"http://www.easyhdr.com/download.php\"]demonstration version[/url] of easyHDR is fully functional, however a watermark is added to the output images.

EasyHDR is an image processing software that produces and tone-mapps High Dynamic Range images from normal, 24-bit, true color photos taken with a typical digital camera. You can squeeze much more from your camera than you have ever imagined. EasyHDR can also tone map already created HDR images saved as Radiance RGBE *.hdr or 48 or even 96-bit TIFF. You can also process RAW images from your camera by previously converting them to 48-bit TIFF in a built-in converter.

But what for do you need high dynamic range images? The answer is very simple. For sure you have tried to take a photo of a scene at very bad lighting conditions, when some parts are shadowed and other are brightly lit. When you want to properly expose the shadows you overexpose the bright areas, and when you want to prevent overexposure you underexpose the dark areas. That is a typical problem in astrophotography. Just try to take an image of our Moon at wide angle. Try to catch the lunar seas as well as some dim stars or clouds. You can see all of that with your own eyes so why can't you take such a photo? Well, all of that is because the response to light of the digital camera sensors is linear. Simply, the dark areas need longer exposure time, but then the brightest parts of a high dynamic range scene are overexposed. Of course in some cameras there are 10 or 12 bit A/D converters and the output 8 bit per channel image is created using LUT (Look Up Table).

There is a remedy to that unwanted linearity. You can further alter the photo's luminance scale using curves tool in your image processing software. This allows, for example, to greatly brighten the shadows, while keeping the bright areas not saturated. This method is widely used, but has two major disadvantages: already overexposed parts remain overexposed and the noise level rises.

The idea behind easyHDR is to produce a HDR image from several photos of the same scene taken at different exposure time (or f-number). The brightest parts of the scene should be properly exposed in the shortest exposure photo, and the darkest parts should be visible in the longest exposure. The program allows you to change x/y offset between the images to be stacked. EasyHDR stacks the images in order to produce a HDR result. Then it applies tonemapping to compress the dynamic range so the image can be viewed on a computer screen and saved in TIFF, BMP or JPEG format.

[b]easyHDR features and requirements[/b]

* Operating system: any Windows; also works with Linux on WINE emulator.

* Memory: more RAM means that bigger images can be processed without the need to use slow pagefile (scratch-pad memory on hard drive). Amount of memory that is needed depends on the size of a processed image and not the amount of images in the sequence. Recommended minimum: 512MB.

* Image file format support
- loads: 24/48/96-bit TIFF (uncompressed or compressed - deflate method - ZIP-in-TIFF); Radiance RGBE (Red Green Blue Exponent) .HDR files; 24-bit JPEG; 24-bit BMP
- saves: 24/48-bit TIFF (with or without compression); 24-bit JPEG; 24-bit BMP
- built-in converter DCRAW can convert RAW images from most digital cameras (.RAW; .CRW; .CR2; .RAF; .MRW; .NEF; .ORF; .DNG; .PEF; .X3F; .DCR; .KDC and .SRF) to extended dynamic range, 48-bit TIFFs (without quality loss).

* During the entire processing flow the images are stored in memory as floating point, 96-bit data. Quantization is done when the result is saved (to 8 or 16 bits per channel).

* User can manually adjust the shift between images from a sequence.

* Several tone mapping options are available. You can use one of two masking methods - gauss and bilateral. You can also adjust gamma, curve shape and saturation value (saturation is in fact a modified stationary tone mapping operator). And all of that of course on floating point (32-bit per channel) pixel data.

* You can view the histogram of the output image and set both white and black points.

* The user can select a preview area on the image and process only that part of the photo in order to choose best settings.

* Program settings can be saved to a file and later loaded. You can also save and load entire projects.

* Batch processing - you can prepare a list of image sequences (with associated settings) or previously saved projects, choose result file format and destination directory, click "Do all" button and leave easyHDR to do the whole job automatically.

* You can do some post processing in easyHDR as well (still working on floating point data). Available are: gaussian blur, unsharp mask, median and bilateral (noise reduction) filters and also two color adjustment tools: neutral point (white balance) and sample/target balance.

* Program is in English and Polish language versions.