INTRODUCTION
============

Hdrff is a modular shell script. It's name is the abbreviation of
"HDR für Faule", which is German and means "HDR for lazy people". With
hdrff you neither need to carry a tripod around to take your images, nor
do you need to manually process your files with an endless number of
mouse-clicks.

Hdrff was featured in an article I wrote for the German magazine "Linux-User" 
(issue 09/2010). The current version differs in some minor respects from the
version published together with the article. All scripts were translated,
a few configuration variables were also renamed and some bugs were fixed.

Background of the script is a workflow consisting of various tasks: copy
your files to your hard-disk, convert them to tif, fix chromatic aberrations,
align the images, and so on.

Each step is implemented in a "module". When you run hdrff, you tell the
script which modules to execute, e.g.

$ > hdrff copyFiles name2lc raw2tif

To make hdrff work, you have to edit it's configuration file (see the
documentation for details). Note that hdrff is only the glue. All real
work is done by existing programs.

Starting with release 1.1, there is a simpler interface without the
need to edit configuration-files. This script is called hdrff4img and
works in more Unix-like manner. You pass the files on the commandline
and specifiy the target-task for the images, e.g.

$ > hdrff4img -t hdr dsc_1234.nef dsc_1235.nef dsc_1236.nef

will process the given images and create an HDR-file directly. To tonemap the
resulting file hdr_1234.hdr, you will use the commands

$ > hdrff4img -t mantiuk hdr_1234.hdr
$ > hdrff4img -t fattal  hdr_1234.hdr

While hdrff4img is not as flexible as hdrff and not really suitable to process
whole batches of images, it is useful for testing and for adhoc
image-conversions.


LICENSE
=======

Hdrff is released unter the GPL 3 (see file COPYING). The modules of
hdrff use many other packages, please also check the license of the tools
you use indirectly.



DOCUMENTATION
=============

The full documentation is available in HTML and PDF-format in the
doc-subdirectory. If you install hdrff, you will find the documentation
in $PREFIX/share/doc/packages/hdrff/doc.


FEEDBACK
========

Any feedback (bug-reports, suggestions, criticism) is welcome. Please
use the appropriate hdrff-forum at sourceforge.


