Mons, Belgium - Creaceed, the company behind Hydra, Morph Age, and Magnet, today ships brand new version 1.5 of Hydra for easy HDR image creation on Mac OS X Leopard with updated imaging pipeline and Aperture integration.

This major update of Hydra has many new features that will boost user experience:

• Import / export to Aperture
• Direct process within Aperture thanks to HydraPlugIn for Aperture in beta version
• True HDR Merging (existing image blending still available)
• Tone mapping including Highlight Compression and Local Adaptation
• RAW photo imports with the same cameras supported by Aperture
• DNG photo imports (for unsupported cameras, use Adobe DNG Converter)
• OpenEXR image export to preserve full image dynamics
• Saving presets for later reuse
• Improved user experience and better fullscreen mode
• Improved processing speed and accuracy. Hydra is faster than ever: less than 20 seconds rendering time for a 20-Megapixel image.

What is Hydra?

Hydra gives human eye perception to photographs by creating high dynamic range (HDR) images from a series of regular photographs, either from DSLRs or traditional point-and-shoot cameras. The created image compensates for the limited dynamic range of cameras and it more closely resembles what is actually seen. Unlike most HDR softwares, Hydra does not require images taken with a tripod.

Hydra's advanced image processing pipeline first aligns the images with a non-linear warping algorithm (inherited from Morph Age) and then merges them in a smart way to preserve the interesting inputs of each image. This method has been entirely implemented on the GPU to provide interactive previewing, thanks to core Mac OS X technologies. This allows to accurately tune all parameters (alignment, merging) in real time while observing the changing result before rendering the full resolution image (resolutions above 20 Megapixels supported).

Pricing and Availability:

Hydra 1.5 is immediately available from Creaceed's website at $59.95 (US). It requires any Mac running Mac OS X Leopard and with at least 64 MB of video memory. Intel Mac with 128 recommended. Hydra 1.5 is free for existing Hydra 1.0 owners.