Interested in trying your hand at high dynamic range (HDR) imaging on the cheap? If so, and if you're on the Mac platform,Maczot is having a weekend half price sale on Bracketeer.
Bracketeer is a low-priced alternative to the more fully-featured and user-friendly leader in this field, Photomatix. I've used Photomatix and it rocks. It also costs $99 while, for the rest of today, you can get Bracketeer for only 15 bucks. If you're looking for an HDR bargain, you can't beat that price.
According to Maczot:
Bracketeer is a front-end GUI for Enfuse. Enfuse is a command-line freeware utility which uses multiple exposures of a scene (bracketed exposures) and merges them together to form a uniformly lit scene. It is similar to tonemapping with an HDR image except that no HDR image is ever created, and there is no ghosting. It works with any kind of bracketed image set, not just panoramic equirectangular images. Bracketeer can even auto-align hand-held shots! The results are almost always much better than anything that can be achieved with Photoshop's HDR Tone Mapping.
Apparently, the same serial number you get for Bracketeer can also be used for PanoPreviewer, so you get that Photoshop plug-in for free. What is PanoPreviewer? Damned if I know. Even after reading this explanation on their site, it's over my head:
PanoPreviewer is a Photoshop plug-in for Mac OS X that allows you to preview equirectangular images as VR panoramas. Normally when editing an equirectangular image you're constantly saving the file out and loading it into a utility like CubicConverter so that you can preview it and see what needs touching up. With PanoPreviewer the tedium of that process has been eliminated since you can now preview the pano right in Photoshop!
I'm for anything that eliminates tedium!
FDRtools (basic version) will do HDR with auto-alignment, and it's completely free.
http://www.fdrtools.com/fdrtools_basic_e.php
Posted by: Pat | November 02, 2008 at 08:59 PM