The GUI is simple and clean, as the screen shot below shows. There’s no menu bar at the top of the screen either, which takes a bit of getting used to. It’s a process to blend and distribute brightness for an optimal result. It loads a set of images, merges then goes through an automated step called tonemapping. It’s not true HDR in that it doesn’t create a 32 bit file but rather is an exposure fusion tool. SNS works differently from other applications. Downloaded it, checked it out and decided to add it to the review series. I became aware of SNS via a board posting on The Luminous Landscape forums.
Lite has no GUI or other editing functions and you drag and drop files onto the icon to activate the merging/tonemapping functions which are fully automated. Home has the GUI of Pro but without the batch function. There are 3 versions of the software: Pro Home and Lite.
Those features are full access to the batch processing mode and the ability to save files at full size and bit depth.
I should state upfront that, after writing an email to Sebastian Nibisz with a question, he looked at my blog, saw the review series and sent me a license key to unlock a few features that aren’t availabe in the demo version. The website is in Polish but there’s a Google Translate dropdown in the upper right that will convert to English (or other languages).
Based on what I can see tracking a few IP addresses, most of the attention is coming from Europe but it’s likely that the buzz will move across the pond in due course. It’s obviously getting a fair bit of attention. Since writing the introductory piece for this review series, checking the search stats for my site, SNS has been the single most searched for term that brought people to my blog. SNS-HDR is a relative newcomer to the game. Later versions of Windows don’t need to do this. This is only necessary in WinXP due to limitations on colour management support in that OS. Clicking on this brings up a dialogue box to select the appropriate display profile. Also, something I had overlooked previously is that at the bottom of the tonemapping panel, to the right of the colour profile dropdown is a small monitor icon. While still not quite as fast as some others, it’s now fast enough that speed isn’t a concern. The latest (v1.2) has improved speed over previous versions. UPDATE: Aug– SNS-HDR continues to be improved.