Attempting to capture the different ranges you see with your eyes on camera is quite difficult. For the most part, digital cameras attempt to accurately capture an image but sometimes details are lost in the shadows or in the highlights. In high dynamic range (HDR) photography multiple photographs of varying exposures are taken of the same subject and later combined to produce a photo with a greater dynamic range than if only 1 photo was taken.

There are many ways to go about creating an HDR image and if you're an Aperture user, the folks at Creaceed may have a solution for you with their Hydra 1.5.3 plug-in. While currently wearing the beta badge, Hydra allows Aperture users to select up to 4 photos to create their HDR image and also offers the option to auto align your selected images, allowing you to take photos without the use of a tripod. This is an important feature, as when you are overlaying multiple photos it's important that they all line up perfectly. Controls are well laid out and results are fast and impressive.

While producing a quality HDR image is more than just having the right software, Hydra attempts to ease the post production work allowing you to concentrate on the most important part... what's happening through the lens.

Big day for photographers today. The news at todays' Apple Photokina event was, as expected, the release of Aperture 1.5. Whether Adobe timed their Lightroom announcement to coincide or Apple set the event to coincide with the Lightroom announcement is anybody's guess. Regardless, the new Aperture will be available to current users as a downloadable upgrade sometime this week, and should hit the shelves almost immediately as well. the major new features are:

• Loupe with adjustible controls
• Flexible Library locations with support for any disk location, attached RAID, and even indexed removable media
• Metadata presets
• Advanced color controls
• Improved sharpening algorithms
• iWork '06 and iLife '06 integration

[Via TUAW]

Adobe has released the Windows version of Lightroom Beta 3, its new program aimed at professional photographers, the same market targeted by Apple's Aperture. The beta for Mac OS X has been available for awhile, and both versions can be downloaded for free from Adobe's web site (though its servers seem a bit overwhelmed just now). The Lightroom web site has some videos that show just what can be accomplished with the program.

[Thanks, Mr. Kaiser!]

Aperture, Apple's photo editing app targeted at the pro market, got an upgrade today to 1.1. The new version is a universal binary that'll run on both Intel and PowerPC Macs, and Apple has slashed the price from $499 to $299 ($149 for education markets). New features in this release include improved RAW image quality, RAW fine tuning, a new auto noise compensation function, a new built-in color meter, enhanced export controls, and improved performance.

[Via Digg]