Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Supported file formats: Imports RAW formats (nearly all), JPEG, 24-/48-bit TIFF (uncompressed,
LZW, and ZIP), Radiance RGBE, and OpenEXR; exports Radiance RGBE, OpenEXR,
24-/48-bit TIFF, BMP, OS2, PPM, and TGA
Price level: Basic version is freeware, FDRTools Advanced approx. $75, FDRCompressor plugin
$45
Address: kontakt@andreas-schoemann.de
www.fdrtools.com
HDR Shop
Vendor: USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Purpose: Package for viewing and manipulating high dynamic range (HDR) images
Description
HDR Shop is a processing and manipulation package that allows you to import RAW
data files or low dynamic range files and combine them to form HDR images. Rather
than storing each pixel’s on-screen color, HDR Shop uses floating point numbers to
store the amount of red, green, and blue light that the pixel represents. The computations
involved are necessarily more complex—instead of 0, 1, 2, 3...254, 255, the
numbers can be something like 0.01534, 1.0500, or 1,356,035.0253. Note the huge
range, because these numbers represent real light levels, however many times brighter
the light from (say) an open window in an otherwise dark interior.
HDR Shop accepts plug-ins, including LightGen and Median-Cut (lightprobe sampling);
and Reinhard Tone Mapping (converts HDR to low dynamic range images).
Version 2.0 included many new features, including support for multi-threaded operations
and the ability to assemble HDR direct from Canon RAW images.
Comments
If you want to become involved with HDR, HDR Shop’s Internet home has many tutorials
and is a good place to start. Version 2.0 is significantly faster than its predecessor,
while offering several more features, not least of which is the ability to load and process
digital camera RAW files. Although only Canon RAW is guaranteed to work fully, support
for other formats is included. The software is not inexpensive and requires study
of the tutorials to get the best results.
Version: HDR Shop 2.0 (2008)
OS: Windows only
Supported file formats: Radiance HDR format (RGBE), 16-bit or floating point TIFF, Portable
Float Maps (PFM). With plug-in, supports OpenEXR HDR file format developed by Industrial
Light and Magic