Areia HDR MAX Review
Posted on 23. Jan, 2009 by Terry Reinert in Photography
Over the last few weeks I have been putting Areia’s HDR MAX software through the wringer to see what it could do. I went into this project with high hopes since the feature list on their website is quite impressive. HDR MAX didn’t disappoint but there are still a few things wrong with it that prevent me from dumping Photomatix Pro….
This image came straight out of HDR MAX. No additional processing was done on it.
As many of you know I have been a Photomatix Pro user for quite some time and really like it. But when I started this review I wanted to make sure not to turn this into a comparison between the two applications. Sometime in the near future I will post a direct comparison review of them but for this review I am going to focus almost exclusively on HDR MAX. This review is based on the Areia’s HDR MAX version 1.3.4 for Mac OSX.
So what is HDR MAX? Simply put, it is a high dynamic range image processing application that allows you to create HDR’s from multiple exposures and perform tonal compression (i.e. tone mapping) adjustments to the HDR image. HDR MAX takes the task of HDR processing a step further by giving users the tools to adjust various other characteristics of the image including white balance, curves, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, lightness, exposure values, and more! These features alone put HDR MAX a lot closer to being a single solution rather than having to continue processing the final image in Adobe Photoshop
HDR IMAGE CREATION
The first step in creating a HDR image is… well… creating the HDR! This is done by taking multiple exposures and merging the details from all of them into a single image that has detail throughout the entire exposure range. One of the key ingredients to creating the HDR image is exposure alignment. If the exposures were shot without a tripod or there was a slight vibration of the camera then the images will not line up exactly. This could cause a great deal of unwanted artifacts in the HDR image. Thus, most HDR processing software comes with algorithms to align the images based on various characteristics of the photo. I have to say that the image alignment algorithms HDR MAX runs are pretty darn good. Even on exposures that I shot by hand without a tripod aligned well and ghosting was minimal.
Usually when a HDR image is created the exposures that were used to create the image are no longer needed. Additionally, no new exposures can be added to the HDR image without re-creating the image from the beginning. HDR MAX deviated from this and I am glad it does! Each exposure can be turned on or off during any stage of the HDR processing allowing you to see what kind of impact each exposure has on the final image. It also provides the ability to import new exposres into the HDR image and delete exposures from it. So now instead of having to start over if you want to drop or add an exposure, you can do it all in real time right from HDR MAX. A very cool and useful feature!! On top of all that you can set the histogram to display for RGB, R, G, B, or the Luminance channel.
Oh, I shouldn’t forget to mention that you can manually set the exposure level and exposure interval if you want to. Usually this data is read from the EXIF data that the camera writes into each image but if for some reason your camera doesn’t write EXIF data or if you want to set it manually, you can.
But now I have to tell you about what I see as HDR MAX’s biggest downfall; noise. All the images that I processed using HDR MAX came out with a ton of noise in them. These same images processed in Photomatix Pro didn’t contain that noise. It was so bad that I had to run some of Adobe Photoshop’s noise reducing filters and get a little creative with layer masks so that I could get rid of the noise but not lose other details. Take a look at the images below for an example of the noise that I found in my HDR’s… The two images of the building show the lowest exposure turned off (no noise) and turned on (lots of noise).
HDR IMAGE PROCESSING
The processing features of HDR MAX are similar to those found in other programs. In the tonal adjustment arena it allows you to adjust the intensity, magnitude, and smoothing. These allow you to adjust the level of contrast, tonal output, color vibrancy, details, and the distribution of these things across the image. In the color adjustment arena there are settings for the saturation, gamma, luminance, lighten, darken, white point, and black point. These items are all pretty self explanatory and their affects can be seen very easily by adjusting the slider and watching what happens.
Based on my experiments I found that it is very easy to process a HDR image to appear photo realistic. What I found to be a little tougher was processing the HDR to get the fantasy look that I like to do for a lot of my HDR images. While I could start to get the look and feel that I liked I just couldn’t get the software to really give me what I wanted in that regard. But, as I said above, if you like to shoot for that photo realistic look in your HDR’s then it is easily achieved with HDR MAX.
One thing that absolutely drives me nuts about the user interface on the HDR Adjustments pane is the fact that you cannot click on the slider bar or click on the value and adjust it up or down like you can in Adobe Photoshop. You have to click on the slide marker itself and hold down the mouse button as you slide it side to side. Also, the image preview doesn’t change when you slide the marker… it will only update once you let go of the mouse. This makes fine tuning your adjustment setting difficult especially when you are using a graphics tablet to interact with the application.
A very nice feature to add to the user interface, other than making the slide bar clickable of course, is to allow the user to double click on the slide marker to reset it to its previous position. I cannot count the number of times I changed something just to see the effect and then forgot what it was set at when I wanted to restore it. No more slapping myself because I forgot to write down the value it was at prior to changing it. A really cool feature that could be added is a SAVE / RESTORE feature so that you could save the current position of all the sliders and then restore them back to that position once you’ve made changes that you don’t like.
Another thing that I found to be very annoying is how slow HDR MAX zooms in on the image and how slow it is to update the preview when you make adjustments when the zoom is at 100%. If you stay unzoomed (15% for my image size) then all the adjustments are lighting fast. But once you zoom in to 50% or more then the adjustment time starts to drag. At 100% zoom it is so slow that I just cannot do it. I know that my demand for instantaneous results is a bit much to ask for but the software really needs to be faster when working at zoom rates higher than 33%! Closing all my other applications did not help and I do have twice the ammount of RAM that Areia recommends.
EXPOSURE ADJUSTMENTS
As I mentioned above, HDR MAX allows you to adjust the curves, white balance, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, lightness, and exposure levels of each exposure individually. This is a really cool feature because it gives you a lot more control over the detail in each exposure. These controls allowed me to add that slight S-Curve to each exposure to add in a little more contrast and make the final HDR image pop a bit more. No longer do you have to take the final processed image into Adobe Photoshop and adjust each of these items on the entire image at once… HDR MAX lets you set them on each exposure giving you a lot more control over how the final image will look.
I did find a few little software bugs when playing with the exposure adjustments but they were minor issues… The main one I found was that the preview image either does not update or it shows the wrong image (you can have the preview show you the exposure you are working on or the final HDR image) until you click on one of the preview windows settings. Again, pretty minor things that I am sure Areia will get patched up pretty quick in a future release. An example of each view is provided in the photos below…
IMAGE OUTPUT
HDR MAX allows you to save your processed HDR image in a variety of image formats. As of this version it supports HMD (HDR MAX’s propietary image format), HDR (Radiance), JPG, TIFF (8-bit and 16-bit), or BMP. Since I still wanted to do some post processing in Adobe Photoshop I saved my files as 16-bit TIFF’s as well as HMD’s incase I wanted to go back into HDR MAX and make more adjustments.
On a curious note… does anyone actually use BMP files anymore? Seriously… I don’t think I’ve seen that image format used for anything other than Windows desktop wallpapers in ages and even then I just let Windows do the conversion.
CONCLUSION
I think Areia is doing a great job with HDR MAX. I love the way they keep the exposures seperate so you can turn each one on or off as well as import and delete exposures on the fly. I also love the exposure adjustment features that can be applied to each exposure individually. The level of control that these tools provide is a very big step in the right direction for HDR processing. These features are going to make it really hard to go back to Photomatix Pro!
On the other hand, I think they have a ways to go before HDR MAX really becomes the must have HDR processing application. First off, they have to fix the noise problem and the lag when working at 50%-100% zoom. Those two issues are show stoppers for me because it adds a lot of frustration in having to wait longer when I make changes and also having to do all the noise reducing and layer masking in Adobe Photoshop afterwards. I also think they need to put some time into updating the GUI so that user interactions becomes more seemless and helpful to the user. I know first hand from my own software projects that an application can be a heck of a lot better than another but if it frustrates the user then they will choose the other application.
I would also really like to see the range of adjustments increased so that I can get the same kind of fantasy output from HDR MAX as I can with Photomatix Pro. Believe me, I tried very hard to match the results I got with Photomatix Pro using the same exposures and I just couldn’t get it close. Again, this isn’t a big deal to the photographers and artists that like to keep their HDR’s photo realistic but it is a big deal to those of us, like Ben Willmore, that like to get a little crazy in the processing!
So there you have it… my take on Areia’s HDR MAX software. Lots of good features but a few really bad ones too. I am curious to see if any of you have tried it out yet. Download the free 30-day trial and give it a spin for yourself. Make sure to post a comment and let us know what you think of it!!
LINKS
Areia HDR Contest (ends on January 31st)
Pre-Order Ben Willmore’s upcoming book on HDR photography and processing from Amazon.com!
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