Hydra for Mac allows you to overcome this limitation by merging a number of photos with different exposure settings and to create a natural image that is much closer to what your eyes actually see. Alternatively, Hydra also lets you artistically push contrasts to increase drama and emotions in your pictures beyond reality. Very often, a single photo can’t represent the entire dynamic range of light in a scene due to the physical limitations of the sensor. The picture is either underexposed (too dark) or overexposed (too bright), or both at the same time.
Powerful HDR App
Hydra lets you easily create high-dynamic-range(HDR) images from a set of exposures, effectively capturing both dark and bright subjects to make it more natural or to enhance scene drama.
Optimized for Metal
This tool has been optimized for latest macOS enhancements and brings native Metal support for maximum performance. The app comes with a completely rewritten computation and display architecture that is optimized for Metal from the ground up. It provides a high-precision 128-bit per pixel internal format with extremely fast 60 FPS previewing at full resolution.
Image Alignment & Ghost Removal
Because multiple photos are merged, input pictures typically need alignment to compensate for camera motion if no tripod is used. Also, moving subjects in the scene may create ghosting artefacts that must be handled. The app provides an advanced alignment tool to interactively align images against the reference one by locating feature points. You can inspect alignment quality through various 1 to 1 image difference schemes (blue/red, overlay…) or even preview the whole merging result. Full automatic alignment is also provided for simple cases.
New Tone Mapper
Hydra for macOS comes with a brand new tone mapper based on a new technique which is faster, more accurate, and gives more control for fine tuning the details. This new tone mapper allows real-time previewing on the full resolution image for the best possible user experience. All settings get instant feedback that corresponds to the actual output. 12 tone mapping presets are available in the app from which you can start, and then fine-tune the result using the app’s manual mode.
Modern Features & User Experience
In addition to native Metal support, the tool also provides support for lots of modern OS and hardware features, such as accurate color processing that includes support for Deep & Wide Color of latest Mac displays (P3 Retina displays), integration with Photos app, multitouch trackpad navigation and a gorgeous Mac-native translucent user interface. The app also provides more advanced options when needed, such RAW input options, Radiance and OpenEXR input and output file formats, color space choices for image exports, and per-scope tone mapper settings.
Note: Requires 64-bit processor. Some features are disabled.