Review for HDR Express (Review)
Friday, 25th March 2011, 16:09

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From here on in, HDR Express begins to shine. Rather than complicating the process with awkward hard to understand sliders, or over simplifying it, they've got things spot on. If you want to adjust the overall image exposure you drag the Brightness, boost detail in the lighter parts of the image you drag the Highlights, make the darker bits richer, drag the Shadows. Other important options are the Black Point, Saturation, Warmth and Tint which all do the same thing as in Lightroom and other apps, so will be familiar to everyone.

But the one which makes the biggest change to the image, is the Contrast slider. Now this is where the biggest magic happens, as this is the slider which determines how strong the local contrast is increased. Around the middle mark and you'll have something quite pronounced but still pretty natural. Take it all the way to the max and you'll have that over the top heavy HDR look that divides much of the photographic community.

The Actual Results

So onto the actual results you can achieve by messing with the sliders. I've taken a few shots and used HDR utilities in the past to process them, so it seemed a good idea to shove the same original source material through HDR Express and see what it could achieve. Since each application will use its own algorithm for achieving tone mapping, etc, you can never expect any two pieces of HDR software to produce an identical look. So ultimately whether you are happy with the resulting output will come down to personal preference.

HDR Express isn't perhaps as responsive with the sliders as one might wish, but it does produce a preview of its output pretty quickly, taking at the absolute most a few seconds. This does let you play around with a wide variety of major changes before you decide to save the final output. The suggested Style defaults offer a good starting point for many different looks, and you can configure your own as well, choosing exactly which sliders to limit them to which is a nice touch.

Having tried quite a few HDR options over the last two years, both free and commercial, HDR Express has managed to produce not only the best results, but with the minimum of effort. It lacks the manual alignment feature of Media Chance's Dynamic Photo-HDR, and the interface isn't as responsive, but at the same time it is much less complicated and the results are much better.

In comparison to the last version of Photomatix Pro I tried, which was version 3 if I recall, it produces equally good results but again with so much less fiddling about. I've certainly managed to create very similarly looking images to those I managed with Dynamic Photo-HDR and Photomatix Pro, but in about a third of the time.

Applying HDR to single RAW images is another great way to liven them up, and again HDR Express produces very nice and easily controlable results. I've included one here of my nephew William, to show a very common look that you might have seen people applying to their images these days. Not everyone's cup of tea but personally I don't see the harm in this kind of effect now and again.

Conclusion

Priced at $99, HDR Express costs the same as both Photomatix Pro and somewhat more than Dynamic Photo-HDR. It has a much simpler interface than both, which is far from a bad thing, and if you can accept the fact that a tripod is really needed for HDR work, it is definitely the current front runner in this ever crowded specialist area of photo manipulation software.

The results it manages are excellent and so easy to achieve with very little fiddling, when so many alternatives have dials and switches that confuse more than delight, it's nice to just sit down and make great looking HDR images, rather than wasting time trying to work out how to.

It might not be changing the game as Unified Color promises, but it certainly has improved the playing field.

Pros

• Excellent results
• Easy to understand sliders
• Quick to apply HDR settings
• Efficient multi-threading CPU usage
• Fast image alignment

Cons

• Poor image alignment
• Interface could be more responsive
• Price might be a bit high for some amateurs

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