Hydra. HDR just got cool. And cheap.

There’s no doubt that HDR is a huge buzz at the moment. As a quick catchup it’s a method of expanding the tonal range of images captured by your digital camera - the theory is you use software to overcome hardware limitations that stop you capturing scenes as you remember them. It also makes for pretty cool pictures.

There’s been a slew of software to do this recently from the big daddy that is Photomatix to hobby applications written for specific applications. Most of them are reasonably hard to get your head round and tend to look pretty clunky. Not any more. HDR just got gorgeous - and cheap!

Step forward Hydra, the new HDR processor for Mac OS X. This is a new application from Creaceed which gives extremely fast “HDR” conversions, previewed in real time with a Mac like interface. I.e. gorgeous - and “3D” (which in Mac speak means tilting the display until you can’t actually see it properly - you can turn this off!).

There are a couple of drawbacks at the moment:

1. It’s Leopard only. You’re going to need the brand new operating system to run this because it uses lots of core image processing. Here at TalkRocket Towers, our production machine is still lumbering by on Tiger but we’ll install Hydra on one of the test machines and give it a good go in the near future.
2. It only processes jpegs - not raws which many HDR aficionados would love.
3. It’s not really an HDR application. At the moment it’s only an “exposure blender”. Unless you are into HDR that’s a subtle distinction but if you’re hard core you’ll probably want to sit it out until the next release which the developers are targeting for Spring ‘08.

Despite these though, Hydra looks a very polished application and a welcome addition to the HDR scene - especially given its interesting price point. $39.95 and there’s a trial download too.

Whatever you do, make sure you play the videos on the Hydra site - they use the Mac speech synthesis to hilarious effect

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