How to Create High Dynamic Range (HDR) Images for Free

Imagine that you are inside a large Gothic cathedral, and the sunlight is streaming in from the windows. You pull out your digital camera and take a photograph of the beautiful artwork on the church wall near one of the windows.
But your photo won’t look great because either the painting will be dark and barely visible, or the window will appear as a glaring and dominant white area that is hardly recognizable as a window.

HDR photography is a way to overcome this problem. It actually which works by combining several photos of the same scene, taken at different exposure settings, into one photo.

The details of dark areas (from a longer-duration exposure) are combined with the details of brightly lit areas (from a shorter-duration exposure). The result is a single photo that is correctly exposed in both the dark and light areas. It not only looks like it is correctly exposed, it also looks more dimensional.

CREATE HDR IMAGES USING PICTURENAUT

To create HDR photographs you will need to do two things. First, it would be wise to use a tripod when you take your series of differently exposed photos (try 3 photos, -2EV, 0EV, +2EV), which will ensure that all of the photos are identically composed. Second, you need to combine the series of photos by using special HDR software. There are several free HDR software packages, and Picturenaut is the best among them.
Picturenaut is a free software which does the job of creating HRD images easily and effortlessly. You can combine multiple standard dynamic range images to get a perfect HDR image using this excellent app.
You can input multiple images with standard dynamic range and then creates HDR images quickly. Picturenaut’s consistent multi-threaded architecture makes it the fastest tone mapper.
 

KEY FEATURES OF PICTURENAUT APP

Automatic image alignment
Exposure correction
Color balancing
Ghost removal
RAW support
Noise level compensation
Full control over camera curve
Zoom and pan
Display gamma and exposure
LDR formats: TIFF, JPEG, TGA, RAW
HDR formats: TIFF float, OpenEXR, PFM, Radiance RGBE

The downside of this app is that you cannot alter the alignment of the image manually, but however the auto alignments gives the best results. If you are looking for straightforward images without excessive tone mapping this has to be your choice.
 
Download Picturenaut From This Link:- http://www.hdrlabs.com/picturenaut/
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