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Over the next few posts on the blog, I’m going to do reviews of some of the many HDR software applications out there on the market. These aren’t going to be highly technical or get into the nitty gritty of what each individual slider or control does. What I’m looking at is results. Results on real world images. How easy and intuitive is the software to use? How easily can you generate a ‘realistic’ result? How well can it generate the ‘grunge’ HDR look? How fast is it (i.e., can it be used in a workflow when turnaround time is important)? What’s the look and feel of the software? These are the kinds of things I’m going to be looking at.  I’ll also look at what kind of documentation/support is available for each application.  In all cases, once the HDR file has been tonemapped into a 16 bit space, no further editing will be done.  The goal is to show only what the HDR applications in isolation can do.

‘Who the hell are you?’ you may be asking as you read this. Well, I’m no Jack Howard, author of “Practical HDRI” or Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs fame.  Not on their worst days and on my best days.  I’m just you’re averge schmuck photographer who (a) likes HDR and what it can do, (b) has tried a fair number of different HDR apps and (c) uses HDR in some of my photography.  I’ve written a few previous commentaries on HDR here in the blog as well.  I’m not sponsored by any company and I don’t get freebies so the thoughts and opinions expressed during these tests will be genuine and without the filter of having to try to keep someone happy in order to keep the swag train running.

The process is going to be fairly simple.  Each app. will be put through two tests.  The first test will be with an existing, already merged Radiance (.hdr) file from my archives that would have been merged in Photomatix.  I’ll open that file in each of the applications and tonemap it.  I’ll try to get a realistic result and a more surreal result.  The second test will be to load a set of bracketed exposures into each app. to see how it handles that part of the process – how long it takes to load the files, how well it aligns the various image layers and then how the tonemapping works out; and there could be some different results from a merge done in the software vs. using an existing .hdr file merged in another app.

Each app. will be scored on several criteria on a scale of 0-10.  I’ll weight each criterion (based on my own perception of importance) and then come up with a weighted average score for each application.

The apps that will be included in the review are the following:

Photoshop CS5 Extended

Photomatix Pro

Dynamic Photo HDR

Artizen HDR

HDR Photostudio

Ariea HDRMax

SNS-HDR Pro (this is a new one I’ve recently become aware of, use the Google language dropdown in the upper right corner of the homepage to change the language, unless you’re fluent in Polish).

HDR Darkroom

Once all the tests are done, I’ll do one final comparison and include price to come up with a pseudo-value for money score.  PS CS5 will be left out of this last comparison.  It’s so much more expensive than any of the others it wouldn’t be fair to include it on that basis.  It also does so much more than the others that it’s difficult to separate out just the cost component of the HDR functionality.

Some of the apps, I’ve paid for and are fully licensed.  Some are trial versions.  A quick note to software vendors before going on:  If you’re going to make a trial version of the software do two things – (a) make it fully functioning so people who want to try it can get a true sense of what it can do and (b) don’t cripple it in some fashion such as not allowing trial users to save full bit depth files or put a big-ass, ugly watermark across the image.  Time limit to whatever period (30 days, 60 days, whatever) and let people have at it.  Stepping down off the soap box now.

My concept of speed may be very different from yours.  My computing environment is as follows:  Asus M2N-E motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ @ 2GHx, 4GB DDR2 Dual Channel PC6400 RAM @ 800MHz, Windows 7 64 bit OS, 160GB Seagate Barracuda SATA with OS/applications, 1TB WD Caviar SATA for scratch disk.  Not a speed demon by today’s standards but not quite snail slow either.

So there you have it.  Those are the basics of the review.  I hope to have each new review up within a couple days of each other.  I’m not going to spend weeks and months playing with these applications.  This is meant to be a real world test and not many of us can spend the amount of time that people who review gear and software for a living can spend with a particular application.  I’ve already spent a fair bit of time with several of these applications and the only ones that are really new are PS CS5 and SNS-HDR.

I wrote a post a while back called The Great HDR Debate.  That was almost a year ago.  It seems that the debate over HDR, its validity as a photo editing tool, the results generated and the concept in total remain every bit as controversial and perhaps even moreso than at that time.  It seems as though the anti-HDR camp is becoming increasingly zealous in their opposition to HDR in any form.

I was recently on a photo forum where a member had asked a question about how to do HDR.  He’d seen some, thought it was interesting and wanted to try it out but didn’t know how to get started.  Through more than a page of responses there were a raft of people telling him ‘don’t bother’ or ‘HDR sucks’, or ‘go ahead and check it out but NEVER use it on real photos’.  Probably a dozen or more responses telling him how bad HDR was but not one person answering his actual question.  Is this what it’s come to?  If so, why?

I’ve said in the past that I’m not a big fan of the hyper-processed, way over the top, comic book looking HDR effects.  It just doesn’t appeal to me.  But I know it does to some.  So be it.  It’s part of the subjective nature of the appreciation of art.  It continues to surprise me (although maybe it shouldn’t) that there is still, in this day and age, such a closed-minded, intolerant, ignorant presence in the art community.

HDR is a terrific tool for photographers to have in their arsenal.  I spent some time recently in an old, unused, train station in Buffalo.  The Buffalo Central Terminal is a terrific example of Art Deco architecture.  It was built at a time when Buffalo was the 2nd busiest rail hub in the U.S. after Chicago.  Closed for over 30 years and falling into disrepair, a private, not-for-profit group has bought the building and is beginning to restore it.  If they’re successful in raising the money to complete the restoration, it’ll be a beautiful building again.

The building has very large windows that allow a lot of natural light in but there are also very dark areas that make  getting a single, correct exposure difficult.  Below is a single exposure at the ‘correct’ meter reading.  It’s pretty blah.  The light streaming in the large window to camera left shining on the granite floor makes getting the floor and the space under the To Train Concourse entrance difficult.  The Shadow/Highlight tool helps but that can also do a lot of damage to an image.  What it does illustrate is just how good today’s DSLRs are at capturing a pretty wide brightness range.  This was shot with a Nikon D700 at 200 ISO and 1/3s @ f8 with a 28-70 f2.8 at 45mm.  As a documentary or record shot, it’s not bad.  As an artistic photo, it’s not overly good.

Buffalo Central Terminal, Single Image

My plan going in was to shoot for HDR.  I knew it would help with the brightness range and also knew it would help generate a more ‘artistic’ result depending on how I tonemapped it.  The image below is a 9 shot (+/-4) bracket processed through Photomatix from TIFF files exported out of Lightroom.  The tonemapped HDR was then opened in Photoshop for final editing.  I purposely took a little beyond a strict ‘photorealistic’ look.  I wanted to try and evoke a bit of a 30s Art Deco coloured graphic look to complement the architecture. I also wanted to enhance the ‘grittiness’ of the environment.

Buffalo Central Terminal, Photomatix HDR Tonemapped

Could I have got a more photorealistic look?  Sure.  Absolutely.  The image below is a 7 image merge in Enfuse using Timothy Armes’ Lightroom Plugin.

Buffalo Central Terminal, Enfuse blend

To my eye, this blended image looks much better than the single shot.  It’s got better colour, better overall dynamic range and contrast yet it’s still photorealistic and at the same time has a better artistic look than the single image.

But that’s not HDR, you say?  You’re right, it’s technically not.  It’s a blended exposure and it stayed in the 16 bit space throughout the processing.  But it’s still possible to get a ‘realistic’ look using HDR too.  I could have tonemapped the Photomatix image differently and achieved the look of a ‘real’ photo.  The image below a 7 shot bracket processed through HDR PhotoStudio via its Lightroom plugin.  HDR PS is a terrific program.  It works differently from other HDR applications but the results it generates are quite striking.  Jack Howard wrote a piece on the app. on the Adorama Tech Tock Blog.

Buffalo Central Terminal, HDR PhotoStudio

A more ‘real’ photo look.  Better colour, better dynamic range and still a more ‘artistic’ look too.

Neither the Enfuse or HDRPS merges had any additional work done to them.  With a little time in either Lightroom or PS to ‘polish’ them off, the results could be even better.  Much better than a single shot could give.

HDR can be a very useful tool for photographers.  The people who continue to play ostrich are missing out on an opportunity to improve their imagery when the situation suits/requires.  HDR has a number of potential applications in commercial photography – real estate and architecture in particular.  It’s a wonderful tool with plenty of potential and those who refuse to use or learn it are going to be left behind and miss out on business opportuntites to those who do make good use of it.

I recently decided to try using HDR for some, what might be considered, less conventional applications. I was doing some shooting for a local café before Christmas. In one session, I was actually working in the café while it was open. This was kind of cool; customers could see what was going on, people were asking questions and it was a nice interactive environment. In the other session I was shooting in the kitchen in the back of the shop. In both cases space was quite limited and bringing in accessory lighting wasn’t on. What do I do? How do I work around this? How do I get more control of the lighting? HDR? Maybe.  I also thought the detail enhancing aspects of HDR would be beneficial too.

I decided to try shooting the project using HDR. My rationale was that by shooting in HDR and tonemapping with a very light hand I could generate fairly flat, low contrast starting point images that would then allow me to have a bit more control of shadows and light/dark contrast via the digital darkroom.

The bracketed sequences were 7 shots at 1 stop intervals for a -3 to +3 bracket. RAW files were imported into Lightroom. I use Photomatix and the Lightroom plugin for most of my HDR work. I like most of what PM offers and how it works.  One thing I’d like to see the folks at HDRSoft do is add the ability to tag multi-shot, tonemapped HDRs with a colour space.  (They allow it for single-shot, pseudo-HDR conversions but not multi-shot.  Depending on how you have your preferences set up in Lightroom/Photoshop you may end up with your tonemapped TIFFs tagged with a colour space you don’t want.)  Photomatix works faster if you create your 32 bit files from TIFFs rather than RAW files.  The conversion to RAW, particularly out of the LR plugin just takes a little longer.  So after importing my RAW files, the only thing I might adjust is the white balance – nothing else.  The RAW files then get batch exported to 16 bit TIFF files and these TIFF files are what get exported to Photomatix.  You can also use the PM batch function to import the files and process them to 32 bit files or to fully tonemapped LDR files.  Since we’re discussing an HDR workflow I’m not going to go into a discussion of backing up your RAW files right after loading them onto your computer.  But you do back up your RAW files right after loading them onto your computer, right?  Don’t you?  30 lashes with a wet noodle if you don’t.

[Some HDR applications work better/faster with RAW files.  HDR PhotoStudio is one of those.  So if you're using something other than PM, find out what file types work best and adjust your workflow accordingly.]

Once the tonemapping is done, the files get imported back into LR where additional work is done as needed.  If more complex work is needed such as perspective correction, I’ll right-click and choose the Edit In>Photoshop, Edit a Copy and Render using LR to open the image in PS for additional editing that can’t be done in LR.  This way I still have my original TIFF file if I want to go back to it for some reason.  This approach does chew up hard drive space but storage is pretty inexpensive these days so leaving that added flexibility is, I think,  a positive.  Once the work in PS is done, the file gets saved and LR updates the image automatically.

Once all the editing is done, I’ll output for specific purposes.  In most cases this is going to be smaller JPEG files for web use or full rez JPEG files for printing.

How’d the HDR experiment work out?  Well, not badly I think.  The owner of the café is happy with the results, which is the most important thing.

Now, I’m no food stylist (yeah, I know, some would say I’m no photographer either) but I think the end results weren’t too bad.  These small JPEGs don’t show the full detail that is captured in the full size files, unfortunately.  Higher quality versions can be seen on my Facebook Page or my Flickr portfolio.

Handmade chocolates

Lunch