HDR Freeware ?

[Philip Smith]

I’m setting sail for a 3 day backpacking/fishing trip early in the a.m. I’m gonna try to get some bracketed exposure shots to goof around with some HDR. Has anyone had any particularly good or bad experiences you could share with some of the freeware out there? I don’t have the coin to throw at $99 software just to play with pictures with, let alone CS3+plugins.

Thanks…and skip the “HDR is for pansies who can’t shoot pictures” comments. I think it is freakin’ cool so there.

[Philip Smith]

Update. I ended up downloading the Photomatix Basic version. Here are a few of the shots that I put together with it in case anyone else was interested in the freeware HDR stuff. These were all either with 2 exposures or 3 exposures. I wanted to do this because when the leaves are off the trees any long exposure shots always blow out the background sky. So I wanted to take some underexposed shots and combine the shadows. The Photomatix Basic did that for me, but there were a few that looked goofy with it.

This one is a little weird. Not sure if I like it. It wasn’t done in HDR necessarily, just combining the shadows.

This one would’ve turned out a little better if I had remembered to turn my circular polarizer the right direction.

[Mike McKeown]

Wow Philip

It is not offten I go through all the pictures on a web page… I think I went through both the links twice…

Great pics, really great pics.

And then I went throguh the rest of the pics… MMmm, great pics

[Author]

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