Filed under: Cool tools, Odds and ends, Graphic Design
Creaceed's HDR photography contest
Although many TUAW contests are limited to North American participants, here's a contest sponsored by a Belgian Mac development firm that is open to everybody!
Creaceed's Hydra 1.6 software is a Leopard-only solution for creating HDR (High Dynamic Range) photographs. If you're not familiar with HDR photography, it's a way of creating photographs that are closer to what the human eye actually sees (view Flickr gallery). To do this, you take two or more photos of the same scene; some are overexposed, some underexposed, some are just right.
For example, if you see a beautiful sunset with your own eyes, you can see details in both the sunset and the surrounding landscape. Since digital camera CCDs don't have the same dynamic range as your eyes, photos of the sunset usually show the landscape as being too dark. If you get the landscape "right", the sunset is washed out.
Hydra takes those photographs, aligns them, and then performs some algorithmic magic to create HDR images that are perfectly exposed across the entire photograph.
If you got a new digital camera for Christmas, give Hydra a try, and then enter your best HDR images into Creaceed's contest. Entry details can be found here -- good luck!
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dann said 3:34PM on 12-26-2008
I would enter if they didn't make you buy Hydra 1.x first; it just seems like a trick to make you buy their software.
Aside from that I'm glad to see some Leopard-native HDRI software, and maybe I'll give Hydra a try, but for the most part CS3 + Photomatix Pro have been doing fine.
Reply
Austin said 3:35PM on 12-26-2008
Yea, great marketing for that company. Just use Photomatix instead of this program.
Reply
Jonathan said 3:47PM on 12-26-2008
Hooray for Belgium!
finally a contest here on TUAW I could join if I had Hydra instead of Photomatix, which I don't, so I don't.
Reply
bashveank said 4:25PM on 12-26-2008
Just remember that HDR looks best when done subtly. That cartoony "HDR look" is a neat trick, but once you get over the wow factor the pictures look pretty ugly.
Reply
capnrob said 7:32PM on 12-26-2008
I've just gotten a paper on using HDR in scientific photography in press, and I have to say, from the survey of applications I did for it, Hydra is pretty far from my recommendation for a first-time HDR application. It's unstable, its user interface follows Apple style guidelines and traditions about as well as I follow the plot on _Lost_, and it tended to take pretty much every computer I ever ran it on down, and down hard. Its alignment tools can be useful, when all the planets are in alignment and Cthulhu is not angry, but, really, there are easier ways to break your spirit, destroy your sanity, and send your soul shrieking into the nether abyss.
Use Photoshop. Use FDRTools. Use, if you must, Photomatix Pro. But, for the love of the Elder Gods who sit and gibber in the center of the universe, tread warily around Hydra.
Reply
reilly said 7:46PM on 12-26-2008
@capnrob -- I'd be interested in reading your paper on HDR. Is it in a journal or do you have a link to it?
capnrob said 7:53PM on 12-26-2008
It's not out yet; it'll be in the next issue of Paleontologica Electronica , but I wouldn't urge anyone who's not a working paleontologist to read it. Throw a rock, and you'll find a better general purpose intro to HDR - we just felt we should write it up for the paleo community because they wouldn't encounter it otherwise.
Christian Bloch said 1:08PM on 1-02-2009
For what it's worth, I wrote a book on HDR and I'm maintaining a website with plenty useful information: www.HDRLabs.com . See the "Tools" section for a surveyed list of HDR software, and the "Tutorials" section for tips and tricks.
Reply
Mike said 4:36AM on 12-27-2008
Why do I keep seeing the phrase "it's a way of creating photographs that are closer to what the human eye actually sees" ad nauseum? These photos look NOTHING like what I see, that's for sure. It is the photographic equivalent of synthesizers in the Eighties replacing real instruments: They may have been called "Saxophone" but they sounded nothing like a Saxophone. The sooner this style of photography disappears the better.
Reply
Tony said 3:49PM on 12-27-2008
Sounds like you're referring to the tendency of many people to over-use the technology and pump everything up to incredibly fake proportions. (Photomatix Pro is well known to make it easy to over-produce HDR images, creating interesting effects but not very realistic looking images.) When done properly, HDR does actually create photographs that are closer to what the human eye actually sees...
Oomu said 5:10PM on 12-27-2008
because it's true
it's a way to expand the dynamic range of the photography and so to create something more like the eye see
but yeah, you can also create fantasy-like pics.