Essential HDR

This week I downloaded the free trial of Essential HDR by Imaging Luminary.  I am hoping the results I received are from the fact that regardless of your initial image sizes, the free trial version dumbs your result down to  1 megabyte.  While this is a great strategy to keep people from getting a free product, it is a horrible idea for a free trial as you cannot justify spending money on such poor results from the trial version.

The Interface:

I layered the 3 windows for demonstration purposes.  In order to access them you have to click on the tabs that are highlighted.

The Good:

• The histogram feature is awesome and something I wish so much that Photomatix would adopt.  It really helps the process of tonemapping an image.
• The color balancer is nice too, a three slider control is much better than a single temperature slider.

The Bad:

• Limited sliders make for very similar HDR images.
• The shadows clipped beyond belief.  I couldn’t seem to get them right in the tonemapping process.  I believe the clipping is due to the poor 1 megabyte quality images produced due to the trial version.  As I stated before, this trial version does not entice me to drop the cash on the full product!
• The alignment process was pretty far off in 3 of the 5 images I processed.
• Get rid of the tabs and open that whole space up for all three slider sections, a lot of wasted space on the interface.

The Bottom Line:

Purchase the full version and get back to me.  Tell me if the shadow clipping occurs.  From my results below, Essential HDR is not essential in my HDR arsenal.