Essential HDR Community Edition

Essential HDR Community Edition is a lightweight digital photo tool built specifically to help you boost your image appearance with the aid of two built-in tone mapping algorithms.

You are welcomed by a clean feature lineup that allows you to carry out most operations with minimal effort. Photos can be uploaded into the working environment using the built-in browse button or “drag and drop” support.

The utility works with the following image formats: CRW, NEF, ARW, PEF, ORF, RAF, TIFF, BMP, JPG, PNG, DNG, HDR, and others.

Essential HDR Community Edition provides support for two built-in tone mapping modes, namely fast tone balancer (for global tone mapping) and detail revealer (for local tone mapping). The tool enables you to alter the details, brightness, color, saturation, and filling light for both modes.

You can check the histogram, adjust the RGB values, undo or redo your actions, zoom in or out, and switch to a full screen mode. During our testing we have noticed that the tool carries out a task very quickly and provides very good output results.

The program lets you use the EXIF data (when available), automatically align photos, as well as apply an automatic tone mapping algorithm when an image is uploaded into the working environment and set the desired parameters for the fast tone balancer and detail revealer.

Advanced features empower you to set the maximum number of bits per pixel that is used in the source image. The edited photos can be exported to HDR, JPG, BMP, PNG, or TIF file format.

To sum things up, Essential HDR Community Edition helps you edit your images with the aid of two tone mapping algorithms. It would have been useful to see support more filters and special effects in order to enhance the application’s functionality.