Pictures and Code

In one of my favourite forums i found this thread about photography tools for creating high dynamic range images of your own exposure bracketing. It is just a command line application but the results are awesome. I’ve used the HDR Shop before but even with the tone-mapping plug-in the result weren’t good at all with glowing edges and visible seams all over the image.

The new MKHDRI tool uses this method by Greg Ward for automatically matching picture positions. The newest version of MKHDRI and HDRI2LDRI (for low dynamic range compression, jpegs for your crt monitor) can be found here: Version 1.04.02 20.11.2005. The software itself is in english but the tutorial is only in german so far. But its quite easy to use.

c:\ mkhdri -a -co:myCurve.txt -out:myPic.tif myPics\*.tif

For generating the camera curves into the myCurve.txt .

c:\ hdri2ldri -ic:myCurve.txt myPic.tif myPic_ldri.tif

For generating the final LDRI (low dynamic range picture for your crt monitor capabilities). You can get more information by just using the inbuilt help.

c:\ hdri2ldri -?

For getting help.

So there are basicly 2 simple steps.

1. Creating an High Dynamic Range Image and the camera curve (MKHDRI).

2. Using the camera curve to create some Low Dynamic Range Image for your photo gallery (HDRI2LDRI).

He plans to make some nice GUI (graphical user interface) for it, so you have more comfort when generating your LDRI images.