Time to tone up
Hydra Pro is a standalone app for producing High Dynamic Range (HDR) composite images. It’s also available as plug-in for Aperture and Lightroom. HDR images combine several bracketed exposures to produce an image with a greater tonal range than can be represented in a single shot. It’s gained something of a bad reputation as a result of the highly stylised results that have pervaded Flickr and other photo sharing sites, but it can also be used to produce natural-looking results with good highlight and shadow detail in scenes with a wide tonal range.
Hydra Pro is very easy to use. You start by dragging your bracketed exposures onto the app window; it’s equally accepting of Tiffs, Raw files and Jpegs, and sorts them in order from darkest to brightest, assigning an exposure value (EV) to each.
You can add up to seven images, but five is more than enough and three will get you almost as good a result. If everything was shot on a tripod, nothing in the frame moved between exposures and you prepared the images beforehand, you’ll be ready to move on from the preparation workspace to develop the HDR image.
Dealing with movement is one of the big problems with any kind of composite imaging and Hydra Pro provides some useful tools for this. Align Images does exactly what it says. It aligns several handheld shots by creating
