Yosemite Photos, Video and News

This is a comparison of 5 popular programs for producing HDR images. These are high dynamic range photos made from at least 3 bracketed images and have become very popular. They tend to be more realistic looking as you can see all the detail in the shadows and highlights or they can very painterly looking.

After using one of the more popular programs since 2007, Photomatix, I could not upgrade to the latest version, 4, as they wont accept my license code that i have been using since I originally bought it! So I decided to try some of the new crop.

I first tried NIK HDR Efex Pro, 22 megs. This is a brand new high end program costing $150 and you have to have a really STRONG! computer to get it to work as it creates 32 bit files to work with. It is a Photoshop Plugin. I got it to produce a HDR from 1 image but it constantly crashed trying to stitch 3 together, it gives a "out of memory error". The Flicker and forums are awash with this issue and this plugin takes a LONG time just to be able to work the HDR's. Even folks with MACS and 8 gigs of ram are having problems. This program really wites to disk after using all the memory and perhaps this is part of the probelm. Some of these other programs use all cores of multicore processors instead of writing to disk. If they get this to work it looks promising. Since it always crashed there is no sample.

My next try was with the old standard and perhaps best known, Photomatix Pro, $99,  now in version 4. This is a stand alone program and now has many different preset preview thumbnails along the bottom. You can also create and save presets. This program does not take to long to generate the preview but you then have to save your final image and then open it in PS.

Next was the stand alone program HDR Darkroom, 8 megs, $79, and it has a  slick easy to use interface and claims to have a superior raw conversion engine. Also talks about its patented tone mapping and you can create and save presets. There are no preview thumbnails of the presets. One cool feature is that once the image is tone mapped it can be exported straight over to PS, no saving and then reopening.

4th in the line up was Artizen HDR which goes for $50 CDN at 12 megs. It has a lot of features for the price including the ability to clone if needed. This program also works in 32 bit and uses all cores of your processor, all 6 cores were pegged out while tone mapping. It has just a few presets which right off the bat did not look that great. You can save presets and there are no thumbnails of the presets.

 The final program I tried was HDR Expose, 12 megs, $149. This is like the NIk Hdr efex as it converts the files into 32 bit. This program is more for folks who really like to tweak the settings and it can be a little slow and heavy on the processor. Thisa program also pegged outr all 6 cores and used the GPU, all of which the newest programs should do to spread out the load. There are no presets that I could find or thumbnails but it looked like you could save presets although I couldnt figure it out. It does have a toggle for preview and original. This program seemed to produce the best natural looking, sharp image.

After trying all of these programs I am leaning towards HDR Expose as it has the most features and tended to produce the best natural looking image, something I am looking for. If you just want a quick and easy HDR I would say try Artizen or HDR Darkroom. I had not been happy with the latest results from Photomatix and you can see from these images that it produces the least sharp looking one.

Photomatix

HDR DarkRoom

Artizen

HDR Expose