This review of HDR Darkroom Pro takes a look at the Mac HDR app offered by Everimaging on the Apple App Store.
If you're not familiar with HDR software, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is a technique for producing photos that have a greater dynamic range than can be captured by current generation digital cameras.
Why HDR?
If you've ever taken a picture of friends stood in the foreground of a photo and the sky behind appears to be pure white, you will have seen an example of the limitations of digital cameras in regards to their dynamic ranges. The camera has exposed the photo to make the subject appear correctly lit, but the color of the sky has been sacrificed. If the camera had exposed to keep the color in the sky, the subject would have become too dark.
In HDR photography, two or more photos are captured of the same scene, but at different exposures and these are combined in a photo editor or specialist software, to produce a single photo. HDR Darkroom Pro is designed to make this process as easy as possible and to help you produce a final photo that appears well exposed across the whole scene.
The User Interface
HDR Darkroom Pro offers a stylish and generally intuitive interface that looks perfectly at home on Mac OS X. It has a dark gray theme, which is a style that has become fashionable with many photo editing apps and does help to focus the eye on the photo that is being worked on.
I'm not overly fond of the appearance of the buttons in the top bar, but rollover tooltips make their purpose perfectly clear. In the center of the top bar is drop down with two settings. By default this sets to Preview Size Processing meaning that the image you are working on will be a reduced quality file to make the rendering process faster as you edit. Changing to Full Size Processing means you view the full size image, but you may find that your work flow slows as a result.
Moving along to the right, there is a button that allows you to upload directly to your Flickr account, a button to open the limited Preferences and another to open an equally limited Tips dialog.
In the left hand column you can open multiple images and using the Shift or Command keys allows you to select multiple files and drag them into the work space to combine them into a single HDR image.
The right hand column contains a good range of photo editing controls and these are extended with Tone Mapping controls once you have combined multiple photos into a single HDR image. If you open a single image, most of the controls are still available for you to adjust your photo.
In the bottom bar are the controls for zooming and rotating the image, though rotation is only possible in increments of 90 degrees.
Functionality of HDR Darkroom Pro
Though produced as HDR software, as mentioned, you could use the app to make adjustments to individual images. In this respect, HDR Darkroom Pro is a pretty competent general photo editor. Where it does fall down though is in a lack of a crop tool or any feature to allow users to rotate images in anything other than 90 degree increments.
However, its main function is to combine multiple photos into single HDR images and it is quite user-friendly in this action. To combine multiple exposures, you just select those you want to combine in the left hand column and drag them into the work space. A dialog will then open allowing you to select Alignment or No Alignment. If you shot your photos using a tripod, you can select No Alignment, which will make the combining process quicker, but, if like me, you select a range of exposures shot handheld, then you'll need to select Alignment. The software does a good job of adjusting for minor differences between the individual exposures to produce a single combined photo.
If you've no experience of working with HDR software, this app is quite easy to get to grips with, as the additional Tone Mapping controls are quite focused. It invites you try things out and see how they affect the image as you make changes.
It takes a few moments to update after changes are made to the Tone Mapping settings, which does make it attractive to use the Preview Size Processing at this stage. Once you move onto fine tuning the image using the other adjustment controls, you'll probably want to switch to Full Size Processing. Otherwise the detail of the image will not be visible due to a pixelated rendering of the image when you zoom in and highlight detail may not be distinct enough for you to manage accurately.
There are three main options, these being Local Tone Balancer, Local Tone Enhancer and Fast Tone Compressor. Which one you choose to use will be a case of personal taste combined with the type of image you are working with. In addition to these settings are sliders to control the Strength of the effect and another to adjust the Fill Lighting. While this may sound limited in its scope, in practice this offers a wide range of varying image types.
It is very easy to achieve the distinct HDR effect that has been rather overdone by many photographers for the past few years. However you can also set a base effect that you can further tweak with the other controls to produce more naturalistic photos that more closely resemble how the human eye would see the scene.