HDRtist Released Today

HDRtist, from Ohanaware, was released today. It carries the tagline "HDR freeware for the rest of us."

HDRtist is a simple HDR creation tool. It's very easy to use: Just drag your pictures into the window, move the tonemapping slider to where you like the look of the image, and save. The slider is the only adjustment control in the program.

Above is my first try with it. While not anywhere as adjustable as HDRsoft's Photomatix, I think it did a respectable job, considering that it's free. It is also easier to use than the open-source software qtpfsgui.

Being a 1.0 release, I have to say HDRtist has been stable during my little bit of playing with it.

It does seem to take large JPEG files with no problem. To make the image above, I fed it three 7 MB files, each of which expand to about 43 MB when opened. Processing was fairly quick.

When I put 3 Canon RAW files into it in portrait orientation, HDRtist took them without complaint, but the previews of the images were blank boxes. I hit the Save button anyway, and it did make a file, but the orientation was 90 degrees off and cropped.

I'll be playing more with HDRtist later this week.