By Bruce Bicknell

Most of you are familiar with the HDR craze that’s been around for some time and, while there are many ways to achieve this effect, it’s still a mystery to many. Well, the folks at Oloneo are trying to make it easier with the release of their new HDRengine standalone program (US$59) that’s aimed at both the hardcore HDR crowd and new users who want to get HDR images quickly with a lot of control. Loaded with features, you can import RAW files, merge multiple images/exposures, and also tone map a single exposure.

The biggest knock is that it’s Windows-only (you can run it in Parallels on the Mac). Other than that, this is a pretty cool and robust program. So let’s take a look at some of the features.

On opening the program, you’ll get a Timeline that allows you to easily step through your changes to see the differences that you made. Next up is Browse, where you can preview your images with shooting information, EV, and exposure compensation on each image before you do your merge. Once you have your image complete, open it in the Edit window, which is set up for an intuitive workflow: Presets on the left, preview in the middle, and controls on the right.

Novices can get a taste of HDR by hovering over the 40 presets to quickly see a render preview. And, for those more advanced folks, there are four levels in the High Dynamic Tone Compression drop-down, where you can check out None, Auto Tone Mapping, and Global Tone Mapping.

There are a ton of features but not enough room here to explore them all; however, I do encourage you to check out the free trial at the Oloneo website (www.oloneo.com) to get the full effect.

Rating: 9 out of 10

(This review is brought to you courtesy of "Layers Magazine": http://layersmagazine.com/ .)