HDR Software Reviews

Welcome to Strictly HDR!

This site is dedicated to High Dynamic Range Photography.

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[TKRPhoto]

Lately I have been running HDR applications through a series of tests and trials and writing up in-depth reviews of them on my blog. So far I have written reviews on Areia's HDR MAX and Unified Color's HDR PhotoStudio. I am currently testing Media Chance's Dynamic-Photo HDR 4 (DPHDR as many call it) and will write a review on it soon. I've been using Photomatix Pro for a year as well and plan to write something up on that as well. Please feel free to take a look at the reviews I've written so far and leave your thoughts / comments in the comment section after the reviews.

Areia HDRMAX Review: http://www.tkrphoto.com/2009/01/areia-hdr-max-review/
Unified Color HDR PhotoStudio: http://www.tkrphoto.com/2009/03/hdr-photostudio-review/
Unified Color HDR PhotoStudio Review Follow Up: http://www.tkrphoto.com/2009/03/hdr-photostudio-review-follow-up/

The most common thing I read on forums is people asking for comparisons and others giving a very bad answer to that question. You cannot directly compare any of the HDR applications. Instead, you have to look at each one individually to see its strengths and weakness for what you are trying to accomplish. For example, if you want complete control over every exposure and you want to see how that exposure affects the final HDR then HDR MAX is what you want. If you want the utmost quality and preservation of natural color then you want HDR PhotoStudio. So my reviews are stand alone reviews and it is seldom that I mention any of the other programs when I am talking about the other.

That being said... I am planning on doing a very large "head-2-head" test to directly compare the strengths and weaknesses of each program with each other. This will not show what is the best but what is the best for what you are trying to accomplish. I will post a link once I have this completed but it will not be until after I have the DPHDR and Photomatix reviews done.

[SpiffyPix]

I strongly suggest that everyone check out Terry's blog.  There is a ton of great information now at our disposal thanks to his hard work.

The reviews are excellent!  I'm going to spend quite a bit of time visiting this blog.  I even pre-ordered my copy of Ben Wilmore's book due to Terry's blog; I didn't even know it was being written. 

Glad to have you aboard, Terry...

Melanie

[TKRPhoto]

I am glad to hear that you like it. I've been neglecting it as of late but am slowly getting back to updating it regularly. I am also working on some video tutorials based on HDR processing that I am either going to post or offer as a low cost DVD (to save on bandwidth since the video files are huge). It is coming soon... just don't know how soon.