HDR Darkroom Pro Brings Kodachrome Quality To Digital Photography

Many years ago when I was a serious film photography hobbyist, Kodak’s Kodachrome was my film of choice, with its rich, deep saturated colors, long latitude (detail in shadows with a dynamic range of roughly 8 f-stops), and fine-grained image clarity. Kodachrome had a way of making shots look better than real life, in a good and believable way. Its luscious, saturated color and super-sharp image quality derived from the complex subtractive processing method (Kodachrome actually records a monochromatic image when exposed, with the three primary colors added via dye couplers in three steps during processing) that made it unique among the many types of transparency films. Kodachrome had a great run, but its time is past, perhaps not entirely for the better, but the old order changeth, and now there’s a process for digital cameras that brings back Kodachrome-esque image characteristicss to digital images, and for a limited time you can have it for a piddling $7.99 — much less than a roll of Kodachrome film with processing cost at the last going off before Kodak discontinued it.

High dynamic range imaging (or HDR) refers to a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods can produce, thereby overcoming the light limitations of today’s digital cameras. This wide dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

HDR photographs are generally created by capturing multiple standard photographs, preferably on a tripod, using exposure bracketing, and then merging them into a single HDR image. By combining multiple frames with different exposures, HDR technology is able to put all that tonal and color detail into a single image.

HDR Darkroom Pro is an all-in-one High Dynamic Range (HDR) photographic application designed to help you rapidly and easily produce great photographic images using the application’s range of advanced patented HDR technologies like feature-matching alignment technology, noise reduction, local/global tone mapping technologies etc to help you easily produce spectacular images at the fastest rendering speeds available today.

HDR Darkroom Pro is designed to minimize the work in producing professional HDR photos. It makes the HDR imaging workflow easy. HDR Darkroom Pro provides a preview of the images in your working folder, making your workflow more convenient. The application also tags color Flags and Suffixes on each preview image to indicate clearly which one you are working on.

Nearly all of the processing controls in HDR Darkroom Pro are real time, making HDR Darkroom Pro fast, with real time processing as standard. There are more than 30 parameters for you to completely fine tune and control your final images. Curve adjustment, color balance, color temperature and tint adjustment, lens correction, highlight/shadow adjustment, white/black point adjustment, noise reduction, just to name a few, many levels of fine tuning are available.

HDR Darkroom Pro includes a sophisticated RAW converter and supports RAW files captured by most major companies — more than 150 camera models from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Panasonic and others, as well as those using Adobe (DNG). Newly released RAW formats are included in updates as they become available.

HDR Darkroom Pro is compatible with Mac OS 10.6.6 or later and is fully optimized for Mac OS X Lion.

Currently on sale at the Mac App Store for $7.99.

See also My ‘Book Mystique Review of HDRtist Pro 1.0.2 for Mac OS X:
http://bit.ly/iSJbt3