Paris, France - Creaceed is pleased to announce the immediate release and availability of Hydra 3, the most advanced application for creating HDR images on the Mac, at Salon de la Photo in Paris (booth A-04). The version 3 upgrade addresses a large number of user feature requests, and modernizes almost every feature of the application.

Camera sensors - how expensive they might be - are not sensitive enough compared to your eyes. Because of physical limitations, they cannot cope with the full gamut of light. High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography is the best way to fix this technical issue. A series of regular photographs - some underexposed and some overexposed - has to be taken, and imported into Hydra (up to 3 in the Express version, up to 7 in the Pro version). Hydra mixes them in such a way that it will provide human eye-like perception to the output, the HDR image.

Designed from the ground up to take advantage of Mac OS X Lion's latest enhancements, Hydra 3 sports a completely redesigned user interface that makes it much easier to use, and includes many improvements. Creating HDR images, whether you like artistic or photoreastic images best, just can't get any easier.

Hydra 3's major new features:

• Novel and highly controllable tone mapper with 12 presets
• X-Ray-based alignment editing
• Full resolution interactive previewing
• Automatic or zone-based ghost artifact removal
• Optional flashing low/highlights alerts
• Post-processing options: image crop, glow, vignetting, white frame
• Export to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Lightroom, Aperture, Mail
• Improved plug-ins for Aperture and Lightroom
• Application and plug-ins optimized for Lion
• Pro version only: scope-based image processing (color, brightness, and distance tolerance)
• Pro version only: batch processing.

Minimum Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.7.1 Lion or later
• Any Intel Mac with 64-bit Intel processor
• At least 256MB of VRAM (GPU) required. 512MB of VRAM (GPU) highly recommenced.

Pricing and Availability:

Hydra is available in 2 versions:

• Hydra Express 3 retails for $49.99 (USD), with a 10-day introductory price of $24.99 (USD) on the Mac App Store.
• Hydra Pro 3 retails for $99.99 (USD), with a 10-day introductory price of $49.99 (USD) on the Mac App Store.Hydra is available in English, French and German. It can be purchased on Creaceed's website and on the Mac App Store.

The upgrade from Hydra Express 2 to Hydra Express 3 is free. Hydra Pro 2 users who purchased a license as of Jan 1, 2011 are entitled to a free license, and those who purchased a license until Dec 31, 2010 can upgrade for $29.99 (USD) only. Special education pricing is available.