If the organization existed today, I would be a card carrying member of the Kodachrome generation. My first SLR camera was a Pentax Spotmatic which made it through thousands of photos for over a decade. All Kodachrome. That makes me a sucker for over saturated, highly colorful photos. Some of today’s digital cameras can produce the same effect, most don’t. But there’s an app for that.
Enhancement vs. High Dynamic Range
Every Mac photo app, iPhoto included, has an option or two to enhance a photo; some with extra tools beyond point and click so you can control the hue and saturation, Kodachrome style.
That’s a lot of work.
Easier is an app that does the dirty work, especially when it’s along the lines of high dynamic range. HDR Darkroom Pro comes along for less than the price of a couple of rolls of color slides to give photographers point and shoot HDR.
It helps to have a camera capable of shooting multiple images at different exposures, but HDR Darkroom Pro’s results speak for themselves.
The workflow is simple. Choose from presets, or take an image completely into your own hands and adjust settings until the cows come home to roost (cows don’t really roost, but they come home at dinner time).
With faster, relatively new Mac with plenty of RAM and a quick CPU, HDR transformations are nearly instant. You control color balance, temperature, tint, shadows, noise reduction, lens correction, and all those options that were impossible in the Kodachrome era.
HDR Darkroom Pro handles RAW files from most major cameras. It’s easy to go overboard with the controls, but your original photo is never in danger.
Oddly, there’s an option to upload to Flickr, though it’s likely that most PC and Mac notebook displays won’t do the best of your HDR photos justice.
What’s remarkable is that apps like this cost about the same as lunch. Kodachrome never looked so good for so little.
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