John Omvik's blog

HDR guru Christian Bloch runs the HDR Labs blog ( www.hdrlabs.com ). He has written several books on High Dynamic Range Imaging tools and workflow has just published a review of HDR Expose 2 and 32 Float v2. Christian has a great understanding of our Beyond RGB color technology and has seen our products evolve from our first product, HDR Photostudio in 2009 to HDR Expose 2 released just last Tuesday.

His review covers many of the new features as well as the improvements made since the 1.0 release. It is a great read and is especially valuable for any 1.0 users thinking about upgrading.

I am very pleased to announce that 32 Float the latest product based on our patented Beyond RGB color technology is now available for purchase and as a 30-day trial download. 32 Float provides an unprecedented level of editing capa­bilities to Photoshop, allowing you to actually edit the tone and color of 32-bit images and return them as layers without tone mapping. This is especially useful for images with very wide dynamic ranges where you may want to process the highlight information different than the mid-tones or shadow and use layer masks to blend them.

In 1964 Muhammad Ali announced that his strategy to win the heavyweight championship against Sonny Liston, was to "Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee," and summarizing his strategy for avoiding Liston's assaults, said, "Your hands can't hit what your eyes can't see." I have always loved the butterfly and bee quote, but was not aware of his follow-up line until recently, about not being able to hit what your eyes can't see.

Today, Unified Color Technologies is announcing 32 Float, the first 32-bit HDR Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop based on our patented Beyond RGB™ color space, and much like Ali's quote about being elegant and nimble, I think the line about not being able to hit what your eyes can't see is even more compelling.

We've received a tremendous amount of interest from the press and photographers since we officially announced the product last week. Many of the discussions I had leading up to the launch had a common theme. Photographers wanted HDR tools that produced natural looking, real HDR images. Most folks said that they had seen enough of the grunge, hyper realistic, Harry Potter movie (insert your own adjective here) look that has unfortunately become synonymous with the term HDR. While I admit there is a time and place for every special effect, I believe this "Look" has been over used, and achieved the same special effect status as the "Auto Tuner" in the music world.

Today, I am thrilled to announce the launch of our new website and HDR Expose™. HDR Expose is our latest 32-bit HDR Editing application. It builds on the proven features of HDR Photostudio and our patented Beyond RGB™ color technology, with improved features and a whole new UI. Our customers asked for better integration with Adobe Lightroom and Apple's Aperture programs, so we've added seamless "round trip" support with all new export plug-ins. We've improved our RAW Image processing, included support for new camera RAW files and added three new ghost removal algorithms.