Hydra HDR creation app to ship at Macworld

Creaceed today unveiled Hydra, a new application that aims to ease the process of creating HDR photographs on Mac systems. Hydra is designed to give human eye perception to photography by creating high dynamic range (HDR) images from a series of regular photographs, either from DSLRs or traditional point-and-shoot cameras. Hydra is priced at $60, but will be available for an introductory price of $40 until the end of January after the application begins shipping during Macworld on January 14th. Hydra requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to run.

The software uses numerous regular photos with different expositions -- or darker and lighter photos -- to create one image that is much closer to what the human eye can see. Hydra works with images taken with as well as without a tripod, and uses the same warping algorithm as Morph Age to permit the alignment of images with offsets beyond a few pixels.

An advanced image processing pipeline first aligns various images with the non-linear warping algorithm, and then blends them to preserve the interesting aspects of each image. The method is implemented entirely on the GPU to provide interactive viewing via core Mac OS X technology, allowing users to accurately tune all parameters in real-time while observing the changing result.

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