Luminance HDR vs rawhdr

Luminance HDR is a graphical application for creating and editing high dynamic range images on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It can merge JPEG, TIFF, or RAW photos of the same scene taken at different exposures. Supported HDR formats include OpenEXR, Radiance RGBE, 16-bit and 32-bit TIFF, RAW, and PFS; it also handles JPEG, PNG, PPM, PBM, TIFF, and FITS.

The workflow includes loading and saving HDR files, rotation, resizing, tone mapping, projective transformations, and copying EXIF data between image sets. RAW processing uses the LibRAW library. Other listed features include multiple tone-mapping operators, batch HDR merging, batch tone mapping, a command-line interface, and color management. The software is free and distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0. Prebuilt installation options are documented for all three desktop platforms. Building from source can require dependencies including Qt5, Exiv2, Little CMS, and LibRaw.

rawhdr is a free command-line package for combining multiple RAW photographs into a high-dynamic-range image. It also performs focus stacking from multiple images. RAW input can use formats known by the rawpy library, while output can use HDR formats known by imageio. The resulting HDR exposure follows the first RAW file supplied. Installation is documented with pip install rawhdr, and a Python API is available for exposure merging and focus stacking. Its exposure-scaling helper leaves out extremely bright pixels that may be saturated and very dark pixels that may be noisy. OpenEXR writing may require the additional freeimage library through imageio. Python 3.7 or newer is required. PyPI classifies the package as OS Independent, with Linux and API listed as platforms. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later. PyPI names Felix Thaler as author and maintainer.