Our True Color technology powers both HDR Express 2 and HDR Expose 2. The interfaces of the two products are designed for different photographer’s needs. HDR Express 2 is designed for the photographer who wants to get into HDR photographer quickly and easily. It provides presets that eliminate the guesswork in creating the look you are trying to achieve. And, when you use a preset you can still make additional edits using its simplified toolset.

Choose HDR Express 2 if you want to get going with HDR photography quickly. Choose HDR Expose 2 if you are looking for a full 32-bit color application that gives you maximum control over the tone mapping and editing process.

The new image browser in HDR Express 2 is designed to eliminate the frustration of finding the photo you want in a group or folder of images on your computer when using the Open Image menu selection. The new Image Browser in provides a visual thumbnail presentation of your images for easy selection.

HDR photography requires merging multiple bracketed exposures of the same image. HDR Express 2 automatically groups multiple bracketed exposures in its Open dialog box for easy selection, opening and merging. The group brackets are based on time interval between frames. If ordering is incorrect you can adjust the timeline using the Auto-Stack images slider.

A merged HDR file typically extends far above and far below your display devices’ ability to display it. Non-adaptive tone mapping is used by most HDR photo applications to the reduce the contrast (difference between brightest and darkest pixels) of the file. This is a non-discriminatory type of tone mapping that gives equal weight to highs, lows and mid-areas when reducing the contrast of the file.

Unified Color’s adaptive tone mapping algorithms inspect the brightness distribution of all the pixels in your image file before it begins the tone mapping process. With the insight of this pixel analysis the adaptive tone mapping algorighm applies the correct amount of contrast reduction to the appropriate areas of the file so that the final image is more natural looking and true to the original scene that was captured.

A “ghost” in a merged HDR image file is an artifact that is the result of a person or object moving in one image of a series of images that were merged to create an HDR file. “De-ghosting” in an HDR application is the process of identifying and removing this “ghost” from the final, merged HDR file.