Useful Freeware

Generate High Quality HDR Images with Picturenaut

Picturenaut is a software to help you generate HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. It allows loading several photos with different exposures and producing one image (16, 32, 64 bit colors) with higher dynamic range (i.e. with bigger difference between the lightest and darkest areas).

The program has a fast and responsive user interface. It allows you to create HDR from multiple images as it supports:

• Automatic alignment of the images
• Color balance
• Automatically determines the camera settings from the EXIF
• Exposure correction

There are two built in tone mapping algorithms

• Adaptive Logarithmic
• Photoreceptor Physiology

, although more can be added via the plugin interface. Several plugins are available and the program seems to do a fine job. Many settings are available to adjust for the tone mapping and they are previewed real-time, so you can get the best results.

Excellent program, which does not need any installation. Just unzip and run!

Download Web Sites to Your Computer

HTTrack is a software that helps you to mirror whole or partial web sites to a local directory, so you can view them offline. It features many settings to control the download and crawling as well as how to build the local site structure.

It can follow links inside java script or flash and can be used with POST requests of forms. Here are (IMO) the most important features:

• GUI and Command line version to be used in scripts;
• Support for multiple simultaneous connections
• User definable filters for file type, location, size, structure depth, etc.
• Resuming interrupted downloads
• Quick updating of already downloaded sites
• Speed limitations for the transfers
• Support for different structures for the downloaded sites (sub-folders, single folder, etc.)
• Support for mms:// URLs

Overall a very useful piece of software, which proves its worth every time I use it.