HDR and tone mapping bring out all the detail in this shot of Venice’s Grand Canal. High dynamic range (HDR) photography is a technique designed to capture much more detail in color and contrast than traditional photography can. When taking a photograph, a camera can only capture a single exposure. A shaded subject with a bright sky behind it presents a classic conundrum. Capturing the details of the shaded subject requires an exposure that will wash out the sky. Yet an exposure optimized for the sky will underexpose the shaded area, swamping its details in inky darkness. HDR photography captures all those details by snapping three or more images at differing exposures and blending them together.
The Guided Edit mode gives you a column of options for easy editing. Photoshop Elements has long played the role of little brother, with a streamlined interface and toolset designed for amateur photographers, hobbyists, and anyone who doesn’t need all of Photoshop’s advanced functionality—or $649 price tag. At $90, Elements 6 is a tremendous bargain, and head and shoulders above previous versions. This is the first Universal binary version of Elements, and the performance boost on Intel Macs closely mirrors that of Photoshop CS3—it boots quickly and generally feels smooth and responsive. We also ran it on a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Dual Power Mac G5 with respectable speeds. While Adobe claims that Elements can run with 512MB of RAM (1GB is recommended), we found that the program sometimes crashed on our PowerBook, which has 1GB of RAM, but never on our MacBook Pro or Power Mac G5, with 3GB and 2GB of RAM, respectively. We suggest downloading the trial version to see how it performs on your machine.
Acorn offers a very simple, uncluttered interface that lets you focus on the image. iPhoto comes with some decent tools to tweak an image, and even add basic effects. However, if you want to design a montage, add text, or create artwork from scratch, you’re out of luck. You could resort to Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, but both are giant leaps on the learning curve, especially for anyone used to iPhoto. This is where Acorn comes in—it’s not only a good value, but also easy to use.
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