QuickHDR

Capturing the right moment with your camera isn’t as easy as it seems, and other objects can be included in the original frame, messing up your whole shot, or simply the lights don’t put anything into perspective. As such, different tools like QuickHDR can help process pictures before distribution, this one letting you add the HDR effect in various ways.

The setup process is short and uneventful, letting you take it for a spin before you realize. Chances are you need to run it with administrator privileges in case issues prevent it from properly running. With the main window up you can start selecting the pictures you want to work on. There’s a built-in explorer you can use with supported formats like PNG, JPG, BMP, PCX, TGA, TIF, PSD, and PCD.

If you decide to load more pictures, these are neatly shown as thumbnails in a dedicated navigation strip, while selection places it in the center of attention and gets it ready for processing. There’s always a small preview to show the original, which can also be triggered on the main preview while holding down the left mouse button.

There are several ways in which to apply HDR effect to your pictures. On the one hand, there’s the possibility to perform fast processing on one or more pictures. This is done by selecting the desired preset effect from a rich collection, either for a single picture, or in batch mode with options to also resize, and save to other formats.

On the other hand, you can take the time to manually tweak each component of the effect. A dedicated properties panel lets you choose from HDR styles like natural, dynamic, or overdone, with corresponding sliders for values such as strength, radius, highlights recovery, exposure, color, contrast, and more. Custom values can be saved as presets for later use.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that QuickHDR is a neat method of applying HDR effects to your pictures in multiple ways. A rich collection of presets is at your disposal to apply to one or more pictures, list which can be greatly enlarged with your own personal styles.