Saint Malachy’s ~ The Actor’s Chapel ~ A parish church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Located on West 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. Saint Malachy’s church has been serving the theater district since the 1920’s. It’s parishioners have included a number of celebrities including the late Bob Hope, Gregory Peck, as well as many other actors, dancers and musicians.
A few years ago while surfing the web for other HDR softwares in the market, I had the good fortune of learning about Unified Color Technologies HDR (high dynamic range) software. I downloaded the free fully functional 30 day trial of HDR Express and HDR Expose and evaluated the software with a number of my bracketed exposures which had previously posed a challenge for me with other softwares that I used. I was so impressed with the results that I purchased the software shortly after.
I immediately shared my findings with others on blog posts and during the post processing portions of our HDR workshops. All the photographers that tried it were quickly sold on it and agreed that it was one of the best HDR software in the market.
The softwares technology, ease of use and speed alone make for an efficient workflow in itself, but what really impressed me was the results I was able to achieve with the tonalities and color fidelity in my images during my post processing.
Unified Color Technologies has recently released upgrades to HDR Express and HDR Expose. It wasn’t until this week that I finally had the time to download the new versions and give them a try. I was truly blown away with the many improvements that have been implemented in the latest versions. I attribute the great results due to the fact that the software utilizes 32-bit images for the tone-mapping and to their algorithm “Beyond RGB” color space, the basis of HDR Expose 3, HDR Express 2.
I absolutely love how the new HDR Expose 3 now handles alignment and de-ghosting, which was the one area where I felt that earlier versions where more or less in line with other HDR softwares. The de-ghosting has also been vastly improved and the new version now offers the user the option to select the reference image of choice.
The auto alignment feature works rather well by itself, but in the event that it does not perfectly align the images, it gives the user an additional option with absolute control to set up to 8 points in order to exactly tell the software how to correctly align the images for the shifts caused while shooting hand held.
Unified Color Technologies has also reduced their pricing of the already affordable price in order to make their applications more competitive. Mr Alfred Zee, President and CEO of Unified Color has gracefully offered us a 10% off discount from the total purchase price by using the discount code SDCPHOTOGRAPHY during the checkout process.
You may visit Unified Color Technologies website for complete details and to view some amazing images from good friend and excellent photographer Betty Wiley.
