HDR: An Introduction to High Dynamic Range Photography

FDRTools Advanced Workflow

At first glance, FDRTools appears menacing. It has a very serious-looking Graphical User Interface that barely wears either a Mac or Win skin, and doesn't have the warm and fuzzy feel of Photomatix or Photoshop (neither of which are particularly warm and fuzzy, mind you.) It's a different user experience, but once you get comfortable with the program layout, you'll be impressed by its capabilities.

Unlike Photomatix and Photoshop, which offer few, if any, controls over the photomerging process, FDRTools offers a visual preview of exactly which source image is responsible for the data load into the 32-bit HDR at a given exposure range. You also have adjustable histogram sliders to change the blending point between the source images. It's possible to load an entire LDR source image series into FDRTools, and then selectively add and subtract the source images you'll merge to the 32-bit file during the HDR Generation process.

What does all this mean in plain language?

It means that FDRTools has a pretty effective automatic ghost-removal function built into its interface. If the blending points that FDRTools assigns to the source images don't fix your ghosting issues perfectly, you can try to fix the ghosts by manually changing the blending points by activating or deactivating a given LDR source image or by changing the histogram blending points between source images. All the while, another program window shows a section of the unadjusted HDR or the HDR with ...