Hydra

Hydra lets you create beautiful high-dynamic-range (HDR) images by merging multiple exposures, effectively capturing both dark and bright subjects to make it more natural, or to enhance scene drama. A single photo cannot represent the entire dynamic range of light in a scene, due to the physical limitations of the sensor. The picture is either too dark or too bright, or both. Hydra allows you to overcome this limitation by merging a number of photos with different exposure settings, and to create a natural image that is much closer to what your eyes actually see. Alternatively, Hydra can also artistically push contrasts to increase drama and emotion in your pictures beyond reality. This new release of Hydra has been optimized for latest macOS enhancements, and it provides native Metal support with maximum performance, in addition to a more modern and simpler user interface.

New and Improved Features

• Optimized for Metal
• Elegant and easy-to-use translucent user interface
• Automatic or manual image alignment with high-precision live positioning and fine-tuning
• Manual removal of ghosting artefacts using region delineation tool and per-region output contribution
• High-precision, 128-bit internal format
• Much improved tone mapping including presets, and live, full-resolution preview
• Advanced comparison tool of result against original pictures
• Single or multiple input photos of various formats (JPEG, RAW, HDR, EXR)
• Blazingly fast rendering to various output file types (JPG, TIFF, HDR, EXR) and color spaces (sRGB, Pro Photo, AdobeRGB...)
• Accurate color processing, including support for Deep and Wide Color displays (30-bit, DCI-P3 display of latest iMac 27’)
• Integration with Apple Photos app (input / output)

• Optimized for macOS 10.14 Mojave.
• Improved support for dark theme & accent color. Accent color now effective throughout the app, in particular ghost selection & various buttons.
• Metal 2 optimisations.
• Fixed 8-bit rendering on integrated Intel GPUs that could output corrupt image (Mojave only).
• Fixed 32-bit rendering on discrete GPUs that could output black image when tone mapping was not applied.