HDR

Aurora HDR comes to Windows: Very impressive, and chock full of features

I’m a long-time user and big fan of Photomatix from HDRSoft, so when Macphun contacted me to take a look at their HDR software now that they were making it available on Windows, I didn’t make it a huge priority. There were plenty of other high-profile launches like the to cover. Mea culpa. I finally got around to loading Aurora HDR and using it on a few images. It has an impressive, and very slick, UI, and just about every feature you could want in an HDR app. It is going to take me a while to sort through all that it can do and write a more-complete review, but I wanted to get the word out that it is absolutely worth investigating. Here is one sample bracketed image from one of my drones, that aligned nicely, and turned out well shown in the Aurora UI. Stay tuned for more!

Adobe brings pro-friendly RAW HDR capture to Lightroom Mobile

Until now, HDR capture on smartphones has been an under-the-covers merging of several frames in a fairly simple way by the phone itself. Now, Lightroom Mobile offers pro-grade HDR for supported phones. The app’s camera mode will analyze the scene, decide on the needed bracketing, capture the images in RAW mode, and then combine and tonemap them into a 32-bit floating-point DNG RAW file – allowing full HDR editing. This is pretty amazing when you consider that typically a similar workflow involves bracketing on a high-end camera, and the use of specialized software applications to do the merge and tone mapping. It works on the Apple iPhone 6s and later, Samsung Galaxy 7 and 7 edge, and Google’s Pixel family of phones. For users of other phones, there are still some goodies packed into the new version of Lightroom mobile:

Clash of the HDR Titans: Comparison Review of Photomatix Pro and nik HDR Efex Pro Posted

I've posted my comparison of the top two stand-alone High-Dynamic Range (HDR) image processing programs, the brand new HDR Efex Pro 1.1 from nik Software and Photomatix Pro from HDRSoft the longstanding champion on my . It's already stirred up some great controversy among readers who each have their favorite. And this version left out a direct comparison with Photoshop's own built-in HDR features which I've written about previously but as Photoshop continues to expand its offerings in this area we'll begin adding it to future versions of our comparisons.

You can see all the articles we've published on this site about HDR by .

PhotoAcute Studio 2.89 Update Released

PhotoAcute has released PhotoAcute Studio 2.89 which includes better alignment of exposure bracketed images (like those used to create HDR images) with moving objects or varying illumination. It also features some new profiles (listed below) and some other fixes. It is a free download for current users.
Complete list of changes in version 2.89:
- Better blending of HDR images of scenes with moving objects and varying illumination;

DPS 7-07: The Future of Imaging--Camera 2.0, Beyond HDR & more--Event Update & Product News

  Welcome to DPS 7-07. We hope you had a great summer. We sure did, highlighted by our July trips to Alaska for Brown Bear photography. Next year's trips are already mostly full so if you'd like to join us please sign up soon. Closer to home we've also announced our two Texas bird photo safaris for April and we still have one opening on our African "trip of a lifetime" photo safari in November. In the meantime I had a great time speaking at a symposium on High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging at Stanford which has given me lots of new energy to re-capture many local scenes using new techniques.