![]() You can also see the aperture, shutter speed, ISO and focal length of the lens used. ![]() Next to the thumbnail you can see the EXIF data, highlighting their exposure value. Prepare imports your image(s) and in a side panel shows thumbnails of each of the images. Hydra opens the sample project in what they call Prepare Mode. The sample project is three images of different exposure values. ![]() When you first open Hydra, it will show you a sample project that’s really helpful to get started with the app. You can jump in and out of Projects easily to work on different image sets without any need to save your progress. Images imported at the same time become part of a Project inside Hydra. You can also import from your desktop, or you can enable the Hydra extension to Photos that gets installed when you install Hydra. I’ve never found that tiny window to be that useful with my excessively large library, but maybe it works for you. You can use the standard image browser which will reveal your Photos library. There are several ways to import your images into Hydra. Whether you combine several images, or use a single RAW image, the process of creating the HDR image is called tone mapping. A RAW image can contain high enough dynamic range in the file, but it can’t expose all of it to you without the assistance of an HDR program. If you don’t have multiple images, you can still do tone mapping, but it needs to be from an uncompressed RAW image. The applications take the detail in bright white clouds from the under-exposed image, and pull the shadows from the over-exposed image, getting the best of both worlds. Tone mapping is the process of pulling out the data from a set of images merged together. The photos you merge into an HDR image can be simple JPG images or uncompressed RAW images. The tools for HDR can forgive some difference in framing of each image, but tripod is highly recommended for capturing multiple exposures. Some higher-end cameras have a mode where they take these photos in quick succession for you so you get them taken with the same framing. You can take even more photos, going from 3 to 5 to 7 on up. You take one at the optimum exposure, one under exposed and one over exposed. Traditional HDR is where you take several several images at different exposures. ![]() Tonemappingīefore we talk about how to use Hydra, let’s review the concepts of HDR and tonemapping. The website also offers a free trial so you can try it out before you buy. Hydra is half the price of Aurora HDR, coming in at $49 in the Mac App Store or directly from the Creaceed website. I’ll simply call it Hydra from now on but remember which one I’m talking about. Now that we have a problem to be solved (creating photos that better represent what the eye can see), and a reason why this isn’t a review of Aurora HDR, let’s take a look at Creaceed’s Hydra for macOS. I may talk about that at some point but let’s stick to HDR photo editing for now. They do this every single year too.Īll that is a precursor to telling you about an HDR photo editor alternative called Hydra for macOS from Creaceed, This is not to be confused with Hydra for iOS from Creaceed, which is an HDR camera app, not an editor. I did some testing of Aurora HDR 2018 vs 2017 and I couldn’t find much to be excited about, especially paying 60% of the price of the original. The software is $99 and upgrade pricing is $59. With Aurora HDR they didn’t abandon the tool but they charge a fortune for upgrades. The products that I told you about in many cases don’t exist, and upgrading is very expensive. You never heard me talk about them again because they have a habit of abandoning products that are only a year old and starting fresh. You may remember that I super excited years ago about a suite of product they created called Creative Kit 2016. The company’s name is Skylum, formerly known as Macphun. The darling of the HDR industry is Aurora HDR, but I’m not personally a fan of the policies of the company that creates it. ![]() Recent models of iPhone and Android models all include HDR modes which do a pretty good job of capturing that range, but you can do even more with some tools for your computer. Luckily there are methods and tools to capture and reveal that high dynamic range, AKA HDR. From a phone camera to a full-sized digital SLR sensor, none of them do as well as our eyes. Have you ever noticed that when you look at a beautiful scene, and then take a photograph of that same scene only to find there are dark shadows with no detail, or those puffy white clouds are all one continuous blob of white? That’s because our eyes can perceive a high dynamic range of light, but our camera sensors can’t do that nearly as well. ![]()
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