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Daily Mac App: Hydra Pro 3
HDR photography is a technique that produces images with a very high dynamic range. To produce an HDR image, you take several shots at varying shutter speeds and combine them using a technique called tone mapping to produce the final photograph. Hydra Pro 3 will allow you to combine up to seven exposures of a scene to wring out the most dynamic range so skies don't get overexposed and shadow details aren't lost. This new version has a 12-preset tone mapper, ghost artifact removers, cropping tools, batch processing and export to Facebook, Flickr, Lightroom, Aperture and OS X Mail. You can create a frame around your image, but the color options are limited. I've been testing the app for a few weeks and found it easy to use and getting solid results. You do get extensive control of your image, and you can make it as realistic or as surreal as you like. If you play with the HDR setting on the iPhone, you can get a taste of the technique, but HDR comes into its own when you work with a higher-quality digital camera and more exposures than the iPhone can provide for combining. I compared Hydra Pro 3 to my first choice in HDR programs, Photomatix Pro. In each set of images I processed, I preferred the Photomatix output. There was more control, and I thought the images had better depth and color. You can see a comparison in the gallery. Hydra Pro 3 failed a few times to automatically align photos. I switched to manual alignment, and that worked fine. Although there is a help menu it did not bring up help, but instead took me to the Creaceed website, where there was no manual for Hydra 3 Pro there either. The company says the manual will be online next week. Swing and a miss. Hydra 3 is roughly half the cost of Photomatix, and you can sample most of the features of Hydra Pro 3 using Hydra Express 3 for US$24.95. Hydra Pro 3 also includes plug-ins for Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, which is a price advantage over Photomatix which charges for those plug-ins. Hydra Pro 3 has a pleasing and clean interface without a lot of arcane sliders. Of course, simplicity is a trade-off for control, but the end result is good. Hydra Pro is US$49.99 for the next few days, which is a 50% savings over the normal cost. %Gallery-136129%
HDR Darkroom Pro is a fast and inexpensive app for creating impressive landscape images
It's nice to see more awareness of HDR (high dynamic range) photography. The iPhone has a built-in HDR mode, and more and more software is supporting the combining of images shot at different shutter speeds, combined to create an image that captures more shadow detail without blowing out the highlights. HDR Darkroom Pro for OS X is on sale at a rather dramatic introductory price of US $19.99. It's a 75% off savings. Most HDR apps hover around $100 so this app qualifies as a good bargain while it is on sale. To use the app, you import 3 or more images show at different exposure settings. HDR Pro Darkroom will align the images, and produce a tone-mapped image that will almost always be more pleasing to the eye than a single image with standard exposure. Of course, like anything, HDR can be overdone, and I've seen some pretty horrible examples of photos that were over-saturated and surreal. On the other hand, that may be the effect you are after. HDR Pro Darkroom allows multiple methods of tone mapping, and then gives you control over white/black points, noise reduction, color balance and more. The app is very fast, easily 2-3 times as fast as my reference app, Photomatix, although it should be noted that the preview displays are very fast, the app is slow to save because that is the stage at which it renders the image. Most apps render for the preview, then do a quick save. It's not all roses however. After processing several images, I never saw output as clean as I was getting with Photomatix, or even the built in HDR feature on Photoshop CS5. I especially saw some very rough gradients (check the gallery) when the sky faded from blue to a a bright white on a sunrise shot. Photomatix rendered the transition perfectly. On less challenging material, HDR Darkroom Pro did quite well, but the interface is not intuitive and when you go to the help menu you are taken to the developers site and you have to hunt around for a PDF manual. If you can work around the limitations of HDR Darkroom Pro and want to get your feet wet in HDR photography I think this app is worth a purchase at the sale price. On the other hand, it has a lot of rough edges that simply don't exist in apps like Photomatix or HDR Efex Pro. Note: There are a bewildering number of photo apps at various prices from developer Everimaging. Be sure to go the the Mac App Store on your OS X computer to get the sale price of $19.99. %Gallery-129327%
The iPhone 4 and a Mac on a photography trek
Until a recent trip up to Canyon de Chelly in Northeast Arizona, I hadn't fully realized just how important Apple products have become to my photo workflow. As I sat back to think about the number of ways that Apple has made my job behind the camera easier, I began to realize just how dramatically things have changed since I had a Canon film camera, a backpack full of lenses, and lots of Fuji film. First, let's talk about digital imaging. While Apple doesn't currently make a digital camera, in the old days, they made the Quicktake, which was one of the very first digital cameras on the market. Most of my images pass through Apple hardware and either Apple or third party software. I carry my MacBook Pro on my trips, and I download images from a CF card onto the desktop; I can browse through the images in Aperture or iPhoto. %Gallery-98032%
