Picturenaut

1. Create HDRIs from multiple exposures

• Automatic image alignment
• Exposure correction
• Color balancing
• Ghost removal
• RAW support
• Noise level compensation
• Full control over camera curve

The HDR generation runs asynchronous from the user interface, that means less coffee breaks and a healthier lifestyle for you. Scripting ninjas can use the fully featured commandline version MKHDRI to weave it into an automated workflow.

2. Industry standards: Yes please.

Versatile HDR generation dialog in Picturenaut. Now with RAW support and Ghost Removal!

It reads EXIF metadata and ICC profiles from the source images. Aperture, shutter speed and EV offset can also be edited manually, so you can easily compensate for ND filters and missing/false EXIF data. The ICC profiles are used to optionally derive a reliable standard camera curve.

You can also change the bit depth of any single LDR, and Picturenaut converts it properly into a pseudo-HDRI using a standard gamma curve, or any curve you saved from an ICC profile or derived from a set of calibration images.

2. Compatible with HDRShop

Plugins originally written for HDRShop integrate seamlessly into Picturenaut as well. They simply show up in the "Filters" drop-down menu. They run here better than ever, because their console output is routed to the display and Picturenaut doesn't time out on them like HDRShop does.

There is already is a great collection of filter plugins by Francesco Banterle, including:

• Gaussian Motion Blur
• Absolute HDR Calibration
• Diffuse SH: spherical harmonics
• Median Cut: light source extraction
• MyFilter: custom convolution kernels
  
• FakeHDRI: stretch out LDR pixel values
  
• Physical Sky: generate procedural skies

Add on top a whole bunch of tone mapping operators, and you have a sweet package: Greg Ward, Drago, Scan, EriKate, ExpLog.
Learn more...

3. Tonemapping on the fast lane

One local and three global tone mapping operators are built in, all with mind blowing speed due to multicore-CPU support:

• Adaptive Logarithmic (ala Drago)
• Photoreceptor Physiology (ala Reinhard)
• Bilateral (Local TMO)
• Exposure (simple snapshot)

Every change of the settings updates 100% live on the preview image, even while you are dragging the slider. Watching the histogram squash and stretch in realtime is the ultimate learning experience for figuring out what all these sliders do. As soon as you let a slider go, the current settings are applied to the full size image as well - which usually takes just about some milliseconds.

What you see is what you get. Promised.

Hitting OK only closes the requester, because the final image is already tone mapped in full quality during the live Preview.

4. User-defined Gamma Encoding

Unique is Picturenaut's ability to reuse the camera curve for the Gamma adjustment of a tone mapped LDR result. That way you can preserve the specific look of your camera, or simulate that of another one by applying a previously derived curve as post-adjustment.

5. High Quality 32-bit Resizing

Only Picturenaut offers 7 different interpolation options for resizing HDRs, with precise control over sharpness parameters. Of course, they work on LDRs as well...

6. Rock solid Architecture

Aside from all the whizz-bang, Picturenaut sports:

• Undo and redo
• Zoom and pan
• Display gamma and exposure
• LDR formats: TIFF, JPEG, TGA, RAW
• HDR formats: TIFF float, OpenEXR, PFM, Radiance RGBE
• UNICODE support
• SSE/SSE2 support
• Open-Source Plugin SDK

If all this HDRI talk sounds like mambo-jambo, you'd better refresh your memory with the HDRI Handbook.