HDRMerge

Photography aficionados or simply those who work with multiple images and wish to extend the dynamic range through HDR stacking techniques, might be have difficulties finding dedicated apps for this process. This can in turn make users resort to more complex image processing suites, which albeit provide reliable functionality, fail to offer simplicity. HDRMerge on the other hand, promises to deliver a stripped-down package that focuses solely on merging multiple RAW images for enhancing that sought-after dynamic range.

Right after the swift deployment process, once initialized, the app will prompt users with a file selection for the images that are to compose the final HDR stack. One aspect that bothered us and which we believe could be subject of improvement in future releases is the fact that the aforementioned wizard lacks any image preview capabilities.

Leaving the wizard issue aside, once images have been selected, the basic editor greets users with a plain set of controls, for macro adjustments that seem well constructed.

There are corresponding image toggle controls, for enabling or disabling the topmost layer that has been loaded, but these could be considered to be fiddly, to say the least. Also, the image name isn’t associated in any way with the toggle buttons, making users wonder which exposure are controlling at a certain moment.

The processing performance is very good and we did not experience any lags, however, as a dedicated HDR app, there shouldn’t be any. Those who are worried about noise that occurs when dealing with the “shadow” areas of images can rest assured, as the program selects the least “noisy” pixels from the inputted data.

If going past the lack of an image preview or the multi-image toggling feature that is not so well developed, this program could make a fine candidate for those who need a hassle free way of combining multiple photographs for yielding extended dynamic range imagery.