Photograph by Kai Fisher - Email: short_ribs@hotmail.com

Splendid natural scenery and well-thought-out composition do not always translate into great photos. Often times, photos have blown highlights and dark shadows. Details once seen by naked eyes are lost by the camera.

Not any more!

Introducing Essential HDR™ (code name Wukong), a computer software from Imaging Luminary. Take two more photos: one over-exposed, one under-exposed. Drag&drop all three photos into the Essential HDR™ software.

The Detail Revealer™ tonemapping engine will extract information from all three source photos and recompose every single pixel to produce a high quality, naturally-looking output.

This is the power of High Dynamic Range (HDR) Tonemapping! If you are new to this topic, please visit our Support Center for a quick overview. Essential HDR™ has a simpler, easier, and quicker tonemapping process than ever before. Depend on your taste, the result can be very versatile: photo-realistic, surreal, or somewhere in between.

Download the free Community Edition today, and try for yourself. Or, take advantage of the 30% off sale before it ends. You, too, can create photos with exceptional detail, beautiful color, and a finish that a Pro would be proud of!

Experienced HDR photographer? Click here to find out more about the software, the tonemapping engine, and see how it performs compared to others.

Testimonials

"Essential HDR does work and it is very easy to use, works fast and the results look very, very good."

- Rob Sheppard

"I'm not a professional photographer, but I wanted to tell you how much I've enjoyed using your software. It has made my pictures look better by orders of magnitude and increased my enjoyment of photography immeasurably."

- Christian Bloch, author of The HDRI Handbook

- R. Crozier

"A friend directed me to your software and so far I'm very impressed. The Wukong application seems to be extremely fast and efficient, and the results are excellent. ... ... to me, there seems to be more detail retained in the Wukong version and the overall lighting seems more natural"

- Tamlin, Photographer

"I have been beta testing this software for weeks now and REALLY LIKE IT. It renders the most realistic images of all the programs that I have tried. I use it mainly for Real Estate Photography and it is perfect for natural looking images for my clients."

- Bob Ross, "I'm addicted to photography."

Recent News

(Nov. 24th, 2009) - We are moved to a new office location.

(July 10th, 2009) - Essential HDR™ version 1.0 update 3 (build 623) is released. Added support for Olympus and Panasonic camera raw file types, as well as Photoshop CS 4 support.

(June 29th, 2009) - iFlashReady™, the highly rated iPhone version of Midas™ software is on overall top 100 list in Apple's app store for the first time. Tens of thousands of iPhone users have experienced the effectiveness of a local tonemapper.

(May 3rd, 2009) - Midas™ version 1.0 is released. The software is targeting causal photographers. It processes one single jpeg source using a variation of a new HDR tonemapper.

(March 11th, 2009) - Essential HDR™ version 1.0 update 2 (build 607) is released.

(Nov. 1st, 2008) - Essential HDR™ version 1.0 update 1 (build 603) is released.

(July 18th, 2008) - Essential HDR™ version 1.0 (build 598) is released. Two editions available: the free Community Edition, and the Standard Edition. The first 1,000 buyers will enjoy a 30% off when purchasing the Standard Edition.