Review: LightCompressor – HDR App for Mac

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography has been all the rage the last few years. With the advent of digital photos and post processing software, this has become very easy to create these images. There are a number of purpose built applications that do nothing but HDR, and do it very well. LightCompressor falls into what I would call the “Entry Level” HDR apps. It was develpoed by Tai Shimizu. He is also the creator of one of my favorite iPad Apps, FilterStorm. Keep reading and we’ll take a closer look at his newest work.

First of all, you can’t beat the price. At $0.99 in the Mac App store, there is no reason everyone with a Mac shouldn’t own this program. It is super simple to use. You can tell the developer has worked a lot in iOS development. The app has a very iOS look and feel. This is nice because of it’s minimalist layout, but I don’t care for the fixed window size. I’d like to be able to make it larger or zoom in on the image.

The app is strictly designed to combine the exposure of different images for you and to adjust the tone mapping & curve settings for the final output. Once adjusted to taste, you can export the final image as a TIFF. There are not options for other file types. To add images to the app you can either click the Load button and select all your images in a Finder window, or you can just drag the images into the development window. Simple as that.

Final HDR image processed with LightCompressor. Created with 7 exposures taken with 2/3 stop bracketing..

Working with the Curves section or the tone mapping options is easy. Learning how to make your image look the way you want can take a lot of tinkering however. Not sure I would use this application for any professional work, but it was fun to tinker with.

On another note, the main screen of the app when first loaded says “Drag in Aligned Images”. It’s important that your images already be aligned before you load them. That means you need to use a tripod when shooting or align them in post before import to LightCompressor. For my example image, I just used the bracketing feature on my camera and shot at a very high shutter speed. Even that was too slow for it to be really sharp. It looks OK in the web sized images, but not so nice when zoomed in. A tripod is a must. Some of the more advanced HDR apps will do this alignment for you, so just be aware LightCompressor does not. The other option is to just play with the Tone Map function on just a single image to see what kind of latitude you can pull from a RAW file (which the application does support).

Over all it was a fun app to play with. It’s very basic and easy to use. I had to play with some images more than others to get the photos to look just the way I wanted them. So like I said before, be prepared to tinker. While I would enjoy some added feature set, it’s hard to complain for $0.99. If Tai holds true to form with LightCompressor as he did with FilterStorm, I’d expect major functionality updates to be released down the road. I’d recommend you grab it while it’s cheap and give it a go. You can download LightCompressor here.