HDR PhotoStudio is an advanced HDR (High Dynamic Range

High dynamic range imaging

In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods...

) digital imaging

Digital imaging

Digital imaging or digital image acquisition is the creation of digital images, typically from a physical scene. The term is often assumed to imply or include the processing, compression, storage, printing, and display of such images...

 software application developed by Unified Color for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 XP/Vista/7 and Apple's Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. In addition to being a powerful HDR-merge application, HDR PhotoStudio offers an advanced set of image editing

Image editing

Image editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they be digital photographs, traditional analog photographs, or illustrations. Traditional analog image editing is known as photo retouching, using tools such as an airbrush to modify photographs, or editing illustrations with any...

 operations that work in full dynamic range (the website shows an example of processing an image with 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio), full human color range (full gamut

Gamut

In color reproduction, including computer graphics and photography, the gamut, or color gamut , is a certain complete subset of colors. The most common usage refers to the subset of colors which can be accurately represented in a given circumstance, such as within a given color space or by a...

), and in high precision (32-bit floating point). It also has a Color Integrity feature that allows users keeping an image's color tone during all of HDR PhotoStudio image editing operations — for example changing the contrast of an image will not change image's chromatic (color tone) data. This problem is usually referred to as "color shift", and HDR PhotoStudio basically solves it.

HDR PhotoStudio implements an advanced HDR image compression

Image compression

The objective of image compression is to reduce irrelevance and redundancy of the image data in order to be able to store or transmit data in an efficient form.- Lossy and lossless compression :...

 format called BEF

BEF (image format)

BEF is an HDR image format developed by Unified Color. It is supported in HDR PhotoStudio, an advanced HDR imaging application, as well as via an Adobe Photoshop image format plug-in...

, and a plug-in for opening and saving files in Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop...

 is also included with the application. The BEF format provides an image storage solution that can archive image data with any dynamic range, full human color range, and a quality setting directly tied to color data precision (the used techniques ties it with JND — just noticeable difference parameter). The BEF compression ratios are claimed to be comparable with those achieved by JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

 compression.

HDR PhotoStudio was discontinued in July 2010 and replaced by HDR Expose.

Versions and pricing

Version 2 was publicly released in March 2009. It is priced at $149 USD. A number of discount codes for the base price can be found on the web.

New and highlighted features

• Unified Color model: support for merging and editing HDR images with any dynamic range, full human color range, and Color Integrity (to avoid "color shift" issue).
• Support for all of camera RAW
  RAW image format
  A camera raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, image scanner, or motion picture film scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor...
  
   formats.
• Support for import HDR images from Radiance HDR
  Radiance (software)
  Radiance is a suite of tools for performing lighting simulation originally written by Greg Ward. It includes a renderer as well as many other tools for measuring the simulated light levels. It uses ray tracing to perform all lighting calculations, accelerated by the use of an octree data structure...
  
   and OpenEXR
  OpenEXR
  OpenEXR is a high dynamic range imaging image file format, released as an open standard along with a set of software tools created by Industrial Light and Magic , released under a free software license similar to the BSD license....
  
  formats.
• An advanced technique of HDR data rendering.
• Scripting support via image recipe.
• Halo removal technique.
• Powerful noise elimination.
• 32-bit/channel floating point high precision representation of image data (96 bit/pixel).
• Multi-core processors support.