Luminance HDR 2.0.2

Luminance HDR is growing, improving and leaving behind some of its historic problem: memory hungriness and unexpected faults. I am trying to sort out as many problem I can and, at the same time, I am getting a lot of patches from really smart guys that I will never thank enough. Most of the work in this new version has been made “under the hood”, so you will not see any drastic change in the UI (which is good… and bad!).

Changes [compared with 2.0.1, while some of them were already present in the 2.0.2-pre1]:

• LibRAW is now in charge to convert RAW files, removing the dependency from dcraw as an external tool (Thanks to Franco Comida)
• New Batch Tonemapping Engine
• Smaller memory footprint during the TM process
• Better acquisition/release of the memory
• [Windows only] improved responsiveness of the UI
• [Windows only] update of some of the dependencies
• [Mac only] Luminance HDR 2.0.2 works on Mac OS X 10.5.X (64 bits version for Snow Leopard also planned, but not yet released)
• [Mac only] Better UI in Mac OS X (looks cleaner and closer to the Mac style)
• Huge memory leak during the HDR creation process has been sorted out. The overall procedure is now much faster and uses less memory
• Huge clean of compilation errors and wrong memory allocation/release (Thanks to Elizabeth Oldham)
• [Linux only] Multithread support is active again and improved (using OpenMP)
• [FreeBSD] Cleaner compilation (Thanks to Joao Rocha Braga Filho, Maintainer of Luminance HDR for FreeBSD)

I would also thank a great Luminance’s user, Ron Todd, who made available for all of us his experiments with the new LibRAW engine and blowing highlights (I strongly suggest you to read it!).

My current “To Do” list is too long to fit in here, but while I am releasing this version, I am playing with the Intel TBB library (Threading Building Blocks) and I am probably going to introduce a new dependency in the next version. At the same time, as I am already discussing in a previous blog post, the project will most likely switch to CMake, leaving QMake.

You can download Luminance 2.0.2 using one of these links:

[ Windows (32-bit) ]
[ Mac OS X (32-bit, Intel) ]
[ Source Code ]

If you appreciate Luminance, please consider a donation (there is no minimum amount!):

If you want to share with other users your results, you can use our FlickR group and Facebook group.

[Update, April 30th, 2011] Thank to one of our user, Alessandro Lorenzi, we have a package for Fedora Core 14. You can download it here.