Lucidity Beta

Download v1.0 here.

Thoughts
In general I find HDR to look overprocessed and unnatural, but at the same time I often find photography limiting. What I
can see with my eye is often not what my camera is able to capture. I've tried Photomatix and a few of the
free/shareware tone mapping programs, but I often felt that they were overly complicated or only resulted in unrealistic
images. So I figured I'd put up rather than shut up and try to write something that I'd be happy with using, and I wrote
Lucidity. It's not particularly meant for public consumption -- I really just wrote it for myself -- but I figure other
people might find it useful, or at least would be interested
in trying another tone mapper. And hey, it's free.

Basic Usage
This is going to be very informal, but here's generally what I do.

First, I load the .hdr file into Lucidity and take a look at the histogram. If it's all bunched up at the dark end, I bump up
the gamma until I'm seeing a nicer distribution.

Next, I move Smoothing all the way to the right (a value of 20), and then bring up the Strength until I'm getting the general
contrast balance that I'm looking for. This just needs to be ballpark initially.

From there I adjust the white point and black point so that the histogram fills the range and not too much of it is clipped
to the top or bottom. At this point I sometimes go back to the gamma and adjust to get a more pleasing histogram
distribution. I also use the contrast slider sometimes if I want a more dramatic look, but honestly I'm not that happy
with it at the moment so I generally just leave it alone.

Next I bring the smoothing down to bring up some local contrast, but not so much that it starts looking "HDR". Usually I'll
fiddle with the strength a bit at this point too.

Then I'll usually bump up the saturation a bit because all this processing tends to flatten out the colors, and HDR looks
best when it's got some "pop".

Finally I'll do the last little bit of black and white point adjustment until I'm happy with the look.

To do
- Improve performance, especially on the blur and bitmap generation phases.
- Add support for loading more than just .hdr files.
- Experiment with different ways of normalizing average luminance such that local contrast is preserved while still avoiding "halos".
- Saturation looks to me like it's not exactly doing the right thing. Might be a bug in there.