If you have been experimenting with HDR, chance are you have used either Photomatix or Photoshop’s Merge to HDR Pro. Either way, the interface isn’t very friendly. Well, there is a new program that is trying to change all that. Oloneo is currently in beta and the latest version is stable enough to experiment. Best yet, it even available in a 64-bit version.
1. Use Browse to start a new project.
Oloneo starts by Browsing through your images. Click on the images you need and add them to the Project Image Selection tab. Since I want to combine the images, I used the HDR ToneMap with the Auto Align checked. Just click the Create HDR ToneMap Project to start.
2. Edit the combined image.
The images will combine in a few minutes (depending on the file size). Under the High Dynamic Tone Map, select Auto Tone Mapper from the drop-down and slide the Strength Slider until you get the desired result. That’s it! Really simple. But, if you want to tweak further, you can use the Advance Local Tone Mapper with sliders for Exposure, Contrast, Detail and Sharpness. There are additional controls for Brightness, Saturation, Hue and Luminance.
The image at the top of the page was generated by Oloneo. If you look at the flags, you can tell that it currently does not handle ghost images. Remember, it is still in beta. But, it did successfully align these hand-held images to produce a sharp composite image. Oloneo does handle the Canon 7D Raw files very well. The 64-bit version even performs well on Windows 7 64-bit. October 1, 2010 seems to be the date to end the beta testing. No word on pricing, but if you are looking for a new HDR program, download it. There are a few quick tutorial on the Oloneo site. It’s designed to be simple and produce quick HDR results with additional controls when you are ready for them.
thank you for the great tutorial! 😀