Super HDR Software Sale
It was just brought to my attention that HDR Projects 4 Professionals is on sale for 82% off until August 31st. Normally I wouldn't publish this information on such short notice however this is such a good deal that I decided to make an exception. HDR Projects 4 Professionals normally sells for $198 but right now until August 31st you can buy it for $35. That's a huge discount. If you have any interest at all in creating HDR photos then you should definitely jump on this deal. To get this deal go HERE . Please not that if you are interested in this software I wouldn't wait until August 31st. The creator of this software is in Germany and while I can't confirm it the offer make expire earlier our time. Also the wording said "until" rather than "through" August 31 which could means it expires on August 30th.
Despite my interest in HDR photography I had not heard of HDR Projects 4 Professionals. I already own one of the most highly recommended HDR software programs which is Photomatix Pro which sells for around $100 and Photoshop and Lightroom which I also own also have HDR capabilities. But I decided to do some research on HDR Projects 4 Professionals just to see if it was any good. After reading a few reviews I decided to spend the $35 and purchased the program. There is a free trial version if you want to check it out first.
After installing the program I loaded five bracketed images shot at night to see how it works. I used RAW images but the program also works with jpegs. You also don't have to have a set of bracketed photos as HDR Projects 4 Professionals will work with a single image to extract greater dynamic range from the image.
It didn't take long for the program to combine the images and create a HDR photo but what surprised me is it also created 134 variations of the photo which allowed me to go through them and find the one I liked the best. While going through a 134 images might seem to be a daunting task the program groups the photos into styles so if you know what style you are looking for you can select that style and have fewer images to look at. Once you find one you like HDR Projects 4 Professionals has additional tools to enhance it further.
Below are two photos. The first is the original normally exposed photo produced by my camera. The second is the one I selected from the 134 images produced by HDR Projects 4 Professionals. To be honest I didn't look at all 134 images so there might have been one I liked better but in the interest of time I took the one I liked best out of the first 20. While it might be difficult to see the bottom photo shows much more detail in the shadows. One other very nice thing about HDR Projects 4 Professionals is that it uses special algorithms to reduce halos which often plague many HDR photos. It should also be noted that I made no further adjustments to the photo which I would probably do if I were going to display it.
Even if you have never experimented with HDR photography here is a great opportunity to purchase very good HDR software at a truly great price and even if you already own HDR software I strongly recommend you check out HDR Projects 4 Professionals and spend the $35 and add it to your arsenal of photo editing tools.
