Hydra 1.0 ships, Morph Age 4.0 debuts

Creaceed today began shipping its Hydra 1.0 HDR photography software for Mac, and unveiled a major upgrade to its Morph Age application for morphing as well as warping images and movies. Hydra aims to give the human eye perception to photographs by creating high dynamic range (HDR) images from a series of standard photographs, either from DSLRs or traditional point-and-shoot cameras. Hydra is priced at $60, but is available for an introductory price of $40 until the end of January. Hydra requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to run.

The software uses numerous regular photos with different expositions -- or darker and lighter photos -- to create one image that is much closer to what the human eye can see. Hydra works with images taken with as well as without a tripod, and uses the same warping algorithm as Morph Age to permit the alignment of images with offsets beyond a few pixels.

An advanced image processing pipeline first aligns various images with the non-linear warping algorithm, and then blends them to preserve the interesting aspects of each image. The method is implemented entirely on the GPU to provide interactive viewing via core Mac OS X technology, allowing users to accurately tune all parameters in real-time while observing the changing result.

Morph Age is a reference application for morphing/warping images and movies on Mac OS X. The software saves results to QuickTime movies, and the latest release includes Motion as well as Blending curves editing. The update also offers 'Smart Fit' which enables users to derive the position of all curves from moving just a subset of them, motion tracking to track curves in movies, and face detection to automatically insert a set of face curves in an image.

Morph Age will ship in Regular and Pro versions, with the regular edition offering all new features but working only with still images. The Pro version also includes support for movie inputs and frame accurate keyframing.

Morph Age 4.0 Beta and Morph Age Pro 4.0 Beta are available for download at $60 and $150, respectively. Morph Age 4.0 is a free upgrade for existing Morph Age 3.x customers, while upgrades from 3.x to Pro 4.x are available for $40.

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