easyHDR

With easyHDR, get your digital photos closer to what you've seen with your own eyes. Say goodbye to unwanted over- and underexposures. EasyHDR is an image processing software that produces and tone maps High Dynamic Range images. You will get neat results even if the photos are taken in very difficult lighting conditions. A HDR image is produced from a sequence of photos taken with different exposure settings. It has to be tone mapped, so it can be displayed on a computer screen or printed. If the photos are taken hand-held (without a tripod) the photo alignment tool (automatic as well as manual) can be used. It is possible to compensate for shift, rotation, scale and perspective misalignments. The final result can be further post-processed with build-in filters, which include: sharpening, blur, noise removal, white balance as well as selective color tone modification. The program is capable of importing various file formats: JPEG, TIFF, FITS (used in astrophotography cameras), Radiance RGBE (HDR image) and nearly all digital camera RAW formats, by all vendors. If you have hundreds of photos to process you'll also find batch processing very useful. Just create a task list, start processing and wait for the results.

What is new in this release:

New features and improvements:

• Improved ghost removal - much better match of the fixed ghosted areas to the rest of the generated HDR image,
• Compare mode - show before and after in one workspace, the view is split by a horizontal or vertical, movable bar (see the new icon in the toolbar),
• Faster manual ghost removal preview,
• More auto ghost removal options - now the manual ghost removal window is always shown when de-ghosting is selected, the mask is drawn automatically. User can modify the mask manually, or get it drawn automatically again using different threshold level. It is also possible to select base photo (key frame) - preferred image for patching the marked, ghost areas,
• Better auto alignment - it should have now higher success rate,
• Updated DCRAW and EXIFTOOL (new camera support),
• Last used tone mapping settings are available as a "last used" preset on top of the list; the last used settings are stored on program exit and also when the result image is saved,
• HDR image saving - added 32-bit TIFF format (other formats: Radiance RGBE and OpenEXR do not allow storage of EXIF data; TIFF takes more disk space, but preserves the EXIF),
• Layer painting - added undo/redo functionality (each change is stored in the "history"),
• Fixed several problems in the Mac version:
  • repaired bug that was causing hiccups in main workspace, when the toolboxes were docked to the main window (now the workspace works faster),
  • fixed preview panning issues,
  • no more watermarks on saved HDR/EXR photos (full version),
• Repaired storing of the last used file format,
• New translation: Greek

What is new in version 3.5.0:

New features

• Possibility to save and load projects. The project file contains input photos, pre-generated HDR image (optionally), HDR generation settings, layers with tone mapping settings and also the deghost masks,
• Support for High DPI Retina display - workspaces, tools and icons,
• The preset and tone mapping settings panels are now detachable from the main window, it allows moving them to another monitor in case of dual-screen desktops,
• Option to choose the default HDR image format Radiance RGBE or OpenEXR,
• Option to resize JPEG ouptut photos in batch processing,
• Possibility to define crop area aspect ratio.

• Improved white balance (tone mapping settings),
• Improved smoothing of the deghosting masks,
• Double click on workspaces toggles zoom - fit or 1:1 centering on the clicked spot,
• Improved main window state restore - now also the preset and tone mapping settings panel sizes are saved,
• Option to tweak preset thumbnail size (slider appears when the preset panel is widened a bit),
• Added layer opacity value and option to copy mask into a new layer,
• Added RAW white balancing options to the batch processing setup,
• When working in Lightroom plug-in mode with manual editing option, easyHDR asks whether to save the result on exit,
• DCRAW updated to version 9.22 (support for more cameras),
• Qt library updated to version 5.3.2.

• Fixed a possible crash when new layer is added,
• Repaired rounding of values of tone mapping settings when storing presets,
• Now it is possible to allocate memory for photos larger than 170 MPix,
• A couple of other, less important bug fixes.

What is new in version 3.4.0:

• Layers - user can manually paint masks on several layers, for which it is possible to define completely different tone mapping settings (see the new, rightmost icon in the toolbar, or use Layers->Enable layers int the main menu),
• Automatic EV evaluation option; used by default in case of lack of valid EXIF headers,
• Special performance improvement option - live processing a resampled image - the full resolution one is processed with some delay; this option may be especially useful on slow computers, or in case of very high screen resolutions, when preview size is big.
• Improved HDR generation in case of larger EV differences (3 EV or more),
• Updated DCRAW and Exiftool (support for more cameras),

Requirements:

CPU with SSE2 support (multicore recommended); 2GB of RAM; 1GB of free HDD space

Limitations:

Watermark on resulting photos; no TIFF saving