Luminance and PictureNaut Provide Free HDR Tools

Last week I told you about the ReDynamic plug-in for creating Pseudo HDR from images. Today I'm going to tell you about two more solutions for creating HDR images and both of these are free tools.

Luminance HDR is an open source tool available for both Mac and Windows. It runs as standalone software and can work with a number of formats including many popular RAW flavors. Ideally you will have shot multiple exposures from a tripod for full HDR mapping. I started with just a single image and used the presets included to create the image shown below. I've used the same photo as in the ReDynamix post so you can compare results. What I liked is that it gave me thumbnails of various settings so that I could choose the one I liked best.



Another free tool is Picturenaut 3. It is also a standalone application and it will only work with bracketed exposures. For that reason, I was not able to use it on the sample image I've used with the other tools. I was impressed with the range of adjustments it provided so it is definitely worth a download.

While both of these tools can be freely used, they do accept donations. If you find them useful, please consider making a donation and supporting the developers.

If you have created some cool HDR images, please post them on the Graphics Unleashed Facebook page so that we can all enjoy them.