I’ve written a few previous commentaries on HDR here in the blog as well. I’m just you’re averge schmuck photographer who (a) likes HDR and what it can do, (b) has tried a fair number of different HDR apps and (c) uses HDR in some of my photography. Not on their worst days and on my best days. Well, I’m no Jack Howard, author of “Practical HDRI” or Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs fame. ‘Who the hell are you?’ you may be asking as you read this. The goal is to show only what the HDR applications in isolation can do. In all cases, once the HDR file has been tonemapped into a 16 bit space, no further editing will be done. I’ll also look at what kind of documentation/support is available for each application. How easy and intuitive is the software to use? How easily can you generate a ‘realistic’ result? How well can it generate the ‘grunge’ HDR look? How fast is it (i.e., can it be used in a workflow when turnaround time is important)? What’s the look and feel of the software? These are the kinds of things I’m going to be looking at. These aren’t going to be highly technical or get into the nitty gritty of what each individual slider or control does. Over the next few posts on the blog, I’m going to do reviews of some of the many HDR software applications out there on the market. This is a significant negative, in my opinion, in comparison to the previous two applications. Not allowing the ability to tag input files is one thing but not providing the option to tag output and stripping profiles from tagged input files is something entirely different and not different in a good way. The net result is that what you see when you’re tonemapping the image may be quite different from what you see when you open it for further editing and have to assign a profile. DPHDR doesn’t even honour embedded profiles. If you load tagged TIFFs as your input images, the saved output will not have a colour profile embedded. You can’t have it tag your input RAW files with a colour space during conversion and you can’t tag the saved output with a colour space. More on speed later.ĭPHDR does not employ colour management at any stage in the process. But the speed to merge the files from the preview is slow. Loading a set of RAW files and providing a preview is a bit quicker. hdr file takes much longer than with either of the previous two applications in this review series. I’ll say upfront that speed has never been a strong suit of DPHDR. Dynamic Photo HDR is available for both Windows and Mac but the editing add-on Photo-Bee is Windows only (more below on this). Since I’ve primarily used Photomatix up to now for HDR work, my last paid version of DPHDR is v3.x. The first eight images in my Impressionism II Gallery were made using this method.įor this review, I’m using a trial version of their latest iteration of the software (v4.7). In my case, I used it for manual ‘mis’alignment and to blend multiple image layers into a single impressionistic photo result. When I bought it, I was trying out a few different alternatives and found that DPHDR had a really interesting manual alignment function. DPHDR was the first HDR application I purchased. It has a number of photo/video/graphics related applications available but DPHDR is probably the most well known. Dynamic Photo HDR is from a company called Mediachance.
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