Another great program by the makers of last week’s HDR Darkroom, Everimage LTD. These guys nailed it with HDR Photo Pro. It has a pretty self explanatory interface with a lot to offer. You can get any range of HDR styles with the well engineered slider bars found on the right side of the interface. I was impressed with the handling of the images I threw at it, especially after the last few HDR programs I have reviewed. I tested the alignment feature pretty extensively and HDR Photo Pro aligned them all. The image I settled on for the post was a hand held shot of a 3 image exposure set at the San Francisco Zoo. This shot is very old and I am ashamed to say I shot it in .jpeg, but look how well HDR Photo Pro handled the noise in the image comparison at the bottom of the screen.
The Interface:
The Good:
- Very well engineered slider bars, although minimal they create maximum potential for HDR images.
- The folder view on the left. At first I didn’t like it, but now that I think about it, it has serious potential for speed in post processing. You tell HDR Photo Pro what folder you want it to go to and it opens all the images. Great if you set up a folder with just bracketed exposures. You can then work down the line of images saving as you go and re-using the existing settings for the last image. Very well thought out.
- End result is a great image!
- Very fast processing speeds.
- The noise slider bar and curves adjuster are awesome!
The Bad:
- No drag and drop feature for fast processing of bracketed images. A minor flaw after seeing how they managed the folder scroll bar on the left of the interface.
- The vignette slider bar, while I do tend to like vignettes, throwing a slider bar in the program for it throws off the post processing of the image. I feel vignettes are the final step for an image, by throwing that slider bar in the HDR tonemapping process we are going to see a lot less methodically post processed images out there and a shit ton of vignettes!
- The price, 129.99, 30 dollars more than Photomatix and they don’t have a selective deghosting feature 🙁 Big downfall in my opinion.
The Bottom Line:
Great program, creates kick ass HDR images and stands very firmly next to Photomatix Pro. HDR Photo Pro, you have earned the title Pro in my opinion, now drop and give me 30 and we got a deal!
For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
