New HDR Program Does It Simply, Easily
I have had the opportunity to try out a new HDR program, Essential HDR. My verdict: the program does a straightforward job of producing HDR without some of the over processed look that is typical of this technique, and it comes at a reasonable price.
For off, let's define HDR. Consider the following image, taken from behind North Falls in Oregon's Silver Falls State Part on a sunny morning.
According to Canon's metering system, this was the "right" exposure, f/9.0 @ 0.5 seconds, and it probably represents a good balance between the lightest and the darkest elements. But the water is burned out as are the detail in the trees in the upper right. The shadows in the overhang and in the trees to the right are blocked up. The image is beyond the range of the digital sensor to capture it, even when the RAW image is tweaked. You will not salvage this through digital blending of one RAW image. No, what is needed is a series of exposures that capture all the available tonal range.
This image tiles five separate exposures made in one-stop increments. The +2 shot exposes fairly well for the overhang and foliage behind the falls, the +1 gets more of the detail of the tree at the lower right, the -2 shot gets the sunlit exposed trees in the upper right center, the -1 shot does a better job of the base of the waterfall, and the original exposure gets the area in between the shadows and sunlight. (This is just an example. You wouldn't tile the shots this way and all but the shot with no compensation are off the proper exposure in most of tile they occupy.)
The next question is how to combine them. You could use the 0 shot as the background image, layer the others, and paint them in on a layer mask. And I've had some excellent results with other images doing that. But HDR takes the best of all five and combines them into one shot with high dynamic range. Here's the result using Essential HDR:
Results are most obvious in the pool at the bottom, and I can (and have) improved on this result using a curves adjustment, but what I've shown you here comes straight out of the program with no tweaks.
Any HDR process creates a 48-bit image that has a wider range than your monitor or printer can display. All HDR programs take this image and "tone map" it into a 16-bit or 8-bit space. In most programs, though, you are first presented with the 48-bit image and must set tone mapping adjustments rather blindly.
Not so in Essential HDR. The program's "Fast Tone Balancer" gives you an image you can work with as soon as processing has finished—which is faster than the competitive products I've used. You have the option of opting for the only slightly more complex Detail Revealer, but here too the preview image is a good representation of the final result.
Essential HDR opens RAW files directly and the resulting image can be either saved as a 16-bit file, exported to Photoshop CS2 or Photoshop Elements 6+ or both. It is currently a stand-alone program and its tone-mapping module is not now provided as a Photoshop plug-in. However, the program somewhat compensates for that by providing drag and drop capability.
So far, the program does not save EXIF data on export, but that will change in the next update. Also on tap, more advance alignment (although I had no problems with this and, as you can see, I was using long exposures for this test), batch processing, and support for OpenEXR.
While this is subjective, my direct comparisons of Essential HDR to Photoshop CS3 and Photomatix shows less evidence of the haloing effect that gives away HDR images and, to me, provides an unwanted plastic look. The Detail Revealer technology does appear to sharpen detail without putting it into overdrive, and the WYSIWYG preview guards against that eventuality.
I am not yet certain that Essential HDR will take the place of Photomatix for me, but I will watch the coming upgrade and decide then. But why decide? The program will eventually sell for US$69.99, but at this writing (August, 2008) is available at a bargain US$48.99. At that price, it's a great way to get your HDR feet wet and, if you already own another program, it's not a wallet buster. In addition, a "Community Edition" which produces images limited to 1M pixels is available for free, allowing you to try before you buy.
To learn more, go to the website at Imaging Luminary.
A sampling of other images using Essential HDR is available on my pbase website.