50 Better Available Light Digital Photography
able in both Mac OS and Windows versions and costs $99.
If you have ever photographed a high-contrast scene, you
know that even the best exposure will typically have blown-out
highlights and fl at shadows. Photomatix offers two ways to solve
this problem: Exposure Blending lets you merge differently
exposed photographs into one image with increased dynamic
range. Tone Mapping reveals highlight and shadow details in an
HDR image created from multiple exposures. The tone-mapped
image that’s produced is ready for printing while showing the
complete dynamic range captured.
easyHDR (www.easyhdr.com) is a Windows-only solution
that blends a sequence of photos taken at different exposure
values into an 8-bit tone map HDR image fi le. It uses an
autoalignment feature, and lets you adjust tone curve to fi ne-tune
the contrast as well as to do postprocessing on the resulting
image fi le without, they claim, “any quantization losses.”
The program works with some RAW images—as well as
BMP; JPEG; and 24-, 48-, and 96-bit TIFF and Radiance
RGBE fi le formats—and lets you save as BMP, JPEG (withouteasyHDR is Windows-based image-processing software that produces tone-mapped High Dynamic Range
images from normal, 24-bit, true-color photos taken with a typical digital camera, letting you squeeze much
more from your camera than you could have imagined. © 2007 Joe Farace.