Features Overview

Streamlined Localized User Interface

Creating HDR files is very easy: you just drop your bracketed shots from file or photos manager to the main window and in few more clicks you have an HDR file which you can then tonemap.

Luminance HDR is available in the following languages:

  • Chinese
  • Czech (outdated)
  • Danish
  • English
  • Finnish
  • French (outdated)
  • German
  • Hungarian (outdated)
  • Indonesian (outdated)
  • Italian
  • Polish (outdated)
  • Portuguese (Brazilian)
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Turkish (outdated)

If your language is not supported or localization is incomplete or outdated and you are willing to take care of that, please learn how to do it.

Supported HDR File Formats

Luminance HDR reads and writes:

  • OpenEXR (.exr)
  • Radiance RGBE (.hdr)
  • Logluv TIFF (.tif)
  • 16/32bpc TIFF (.tif)
  • PFS stream (.pfs)
  • FITS (.fit)

Additionally Raw images can be opened (using LibRaw) as both HDR and LDR images.

Supported LDR File Formats

Luminance HDR supports the following low dynamic range file formats:

  • JPEG
  • TIFF (16bpc and 8bpc)
  • PNG (only saving)
  • PBM (only saving)

Luminance HDR can also write Exif metadata to JPEG, PNG and TIFF files using Exiv2.

Extensive Help System

We don’t really pretend that HDR imaging is easy. It surely can be easy if lousy results is what you want. For the rest of you we bundle a solid help system to help you getting the most of your pictures.

The help system is, again, localizable. Right now only English version is available, but you can contribute a translation into your native language, if you really want to.

Free to Distribute

Luminance HDR is a free-as-in-speech application licensed under terms of GNU GPL. Which in fact means:

  • you don’t have to pay developers of Luminance HDR for a license;
  • you may install Luminance HDR on as many computers as you can reach;
  • you may for god’s sake modify the source code, but you will have to share it with us, if you distribute the modified version.