HDR photography for the rest of us

High Dynamic Range photography--the fusing of several images of a scene to improve its tonal subtlties--has been primarily the realm of protogs and Adobe Photoshop merlins, but the technique seems to be slowly reaching the point where any shutterbug with an experimental bent can explore the process without breaking their piggybanks purchasing a heavyweight editing program like Photoshop or HDR software like Photomatix. That's because there's an open source application called Enfuse that will perform the task for free. Granted, in its raw form the software is command-line driven. Former DOS users know what that means. Non-DOS users, take my word for it, you don't want to know what it means. But, as is often the case with open source programs, a few enterprising individuals have concocted graphic interfaces for the application to make it more palatable to Generation GUI.

Enfuse seems to stack up well against its commercial compettiion. In fact, users like professional photographer and blogger Larry Lohrman actually prefer it to market leader Photomatix. In an item published Monday in his Photography for Real Estate blog, the lensslinger acknowledged using Photomatix, but added, "The thing I like about Enfuse is you can get to almost the same place faster." While obtaining an HDR image with Photomatix is a two step process, he noted, Enfuse, which uses a technology called Exposure Fusion, can do it one step.

Improving the dynamic range of digital cameras is something bytecam makers have been focusing on lately. When you combine that with their obsession with including more and more editing features in their cameras, don't be surprised if something like Enfuse ends up in a camera one of these days allowing HDR photos to be made on the fly by anyone.