It also gives you the power when you do want to get creative and create a much more saturated look. HDREngine doesn't give some of the more advanced controls as well as the ability to save presets – for that you will need to look at PhotoEngine, but HDREngine is great at giving you quick ability to create HDR and makes a perfect entry point if you are just getting started.
What is PhotoEngine?
The PhotoEngine is the HDREngine's big brother. It has all of the capabilities and works the same way as described above, but with a lot more features and tools including Radiance and OpenEXR import and export.
The first major area of control comes from the HDR Tone Map Advanced. This has all of the basic tone mapping abilities as shown above, but now has additional panels that will give you even more control over your HDR work.
The first panel is for Photographic Print Toning. Photographic Print Toning simulates a real world chemical process that replaces the silver contained in the photo emulsion by a toner or another metal. This process adds two tones to black and white prints – one for deep shadows and one for highlights. Differing from the real-world process, this one can work with color images. You have two color wheels that you can use to set the saturation and hue – one for shadows and one for highlights.
Next you have two curves panels that you can use to fine tune your images. The first one is for brightness and you can use it to adjust the shadow, mid, and highlight tones. You can click anywhere on the line to set a point and then move it up or down to make an adjustment. You can then manipulate a tangent point to further refine your adjustments.
The second curve panel is for saturation adjustments. It works just like the brightness one, but this one controls the saturation domain. The horizontal axis is the input or original saturation of the image and the vertical axis is the output or edited saturation. The curve is how the input is mapped to the output.
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