Affinity Photo for Windows HDR Trial

[JohnRostron]

As part of my exploration of Serif's Affinity Photo for Windows, currently in its free Public Beta, I tried the HDR facility.

The subject was three images of a stained glass window (the West Window of Gloucester Cathedral) hand held with -1/0/+1 exposure values. I aligned the images in Photoshop first, then worked with the three aligned and cropped images. My usual HDR software is Photomatix Essentials, so I include the output of this for comparison. I also include a larger magnification of the central panel of the window for comparison.

1 West Window and surrounds from Affinity Photo


2 West Window and surrounds from Photomatix


3 West Window central panel from Affinity Photo


4 West Window central panel from Photomatix


My first impression is that the HDR from Affinity is on a par with that of Photomatix. In the central panel, you can see that both show some overexposure in the plain window glass. This could well be down to me not allowing sufficient negative compensation.

Neither of these images had any post-processing except for scaling and cropping. I would normally add a perspective correction. These images do look as if some sharpening would be in order.

Comments welcome.

John

[Sonic4Spuds]

Interesting, the Affinity Photo merge looks like it is better aligned, which is part of why it looks so much sharper, it also looks like it is doing local contrast preservation instead of contrast scaling, which give it an almost over-sharpened look.

Thanks for the comparison!

[Geoff F]

The Affinity versions are certainly sharper.