DYNAMIC PHOTO HDR

T

he objective of HDR processing is to achieve results that are coolest to what the human eye can see. Unlike the human eye digital cameras struggle to capture a vast dynamic range. For example the human eye can perceive shadow brightly lit areas and accurate colors all simultaneously. But digital cameras fail to do so especially in brightly lit scenarios and indoors. You meter the sky’s brightness and the objects on the ground get underexposed and vice-versa. HDR involves shooting the same frame with increasing exposures starting from underexposure and going way up till you get overexposed shots. The HDR application then blends the optimal exposure in all the images and render a single shot in which the entire scene is optimally exposed the deepest blacks and the brightest while maintaining the colors. Dynamic photo HDR by Mediachance is one of the best HDR application we have come across.

FEATURES:

You start with loading a photo taken with multiple exposures. This can be done using exposure bracketing or by manually adjusting the shutter speed or EV. As a bonus feature the program also supported creating HDR with a single image. The exposure levels are guessed automatically or you can specify them manually. Toy can choose from four processing models- tone mapping, fusion blending, complex HDR fusion and HDR video. Tone mapping is the regular method, while fusion blending uses multiple JPEG files to deliver realistic results in a few steps. Complex fusion further involves tone mapping and you get to tinker with a raft of tools. HDR video mode adds HDR like effects to videos.

                In the next step the program creates the HDR image and you move to tone mapping the result to tweak the brightness, color saturation, dynamic light strength and so on. You can either go the manual way and choose from seven presets. You also have the option to tweak a gamma, curves, color and hue using the curve graph. The intensity and directions of light can also be controlled by simply dragging the light source around the frame. If you want surreal color and effects, you can use the color filters and match color tools. Each of this has around 20 presets, which can be instantly applied with a click of a button. Clicking on the work areas extracts a preview of the frame. You can have multiple preview panes and select  the one that you like best or revert to the original. You can specify the audio and video codec. However the choice of codec offered depends on the codec pack that you have installed. Mediachance suggests you install K-lite codec pack which has most of the needed audio and video codec. The time needed to encode the video depends on the kind of hardware you have and the resolution and length of the source video. The work area displays a real time preview of the frame being rendered. What we would have really liked the option to select a clip from the video and support for GPU-based processing. We hope Mediachance adds these features in the next update.

PERFORMANCE:

Our test rig was an average desktop PC powered by the Intel core 2 duo E6700 processor, 2 GB of RAM, and running windows 7 home premier, 32-bit. The software is extremely resource friendly and it ran smoothly without any nags despite using heavy RAW files and real time preview. The quietly of result completely depends on how you tweak the values. However you might want to reduce the noise and chromatic aberration using an image editing program. Videos with HDR-like effects added look nice. The output has better contrast and the colors appear more vivid.