Discover HDR and Tone Mapping for your photos

Luminance HDR (formerly known as Qtpfsgui) is a powerful digital photography tool that allows you get the lighting of your images just right.

Luminance HDR is used to adjust the lighting of images taken at different exposures in order to make them consistent with each other, using HDR technology. Given three images – one over-exposed (say, -2), one normally exposed (0) and one under-exposed (+2), the application will automatically fuse the images in order to ensure the correct exposure in each picture.

This is normally a technique that would require you to be an expert in photography and all the lighting and exposure adjustments you’d have to make would be extremely tedious. Luminance HDR offers a range of clay/tone mapping filters to help you further enrich the quality of your pictures. These include: Fattal, Ashikmin, Durand, Drago, Pattanaik, Reinhard’02 y Reinhard’04. Luminance HDR features support for a wide range of formats including OpenEXR (extension: exr); Radiance RGBE (extension: hdr) and Tiff formats.

As labor saving as Luminance HDR is, it still requires quite a lot of time to get the most out of it. There are many settings and advanced functions that most non-photography professionals won’t feel comfortable with.

Overall though, Luminance HDR is a very good application for enhancing your images especially where light exposures are poor.

Qtpfsgui is a Qt4 graphical user interface that aims to provide a workflow for HDR imaging. It supports a wide range of HDR formats including OpenEXR, Radiance RGBE, Tiff formats, Raw image format and PFS native formats.

It allows you to create an HDR file from a set of images (such as JPEG, TIFF 8bit and 16bit, RAW) of the same scene taken at a different exposure setting. You can save, load, rotate and resize HDR images.

In addition, you can tonemap HDR images and copy exif data between sets of images. The most complete HDR imaging software out there!