HDR 8: are we nearly there yet?

[drm]

Last night I downloaded the latest version of HDR 8. I'm sure there have been various improvements under the hood, but superfically progress seems very slow. It must be 9 months since the first Beta, and there are still basic features, such as zoom, that don't work (apart from the strangely hidden 1:1 workaround), headline features such as GANE which seem to do nothing, and key functionality such as Job Manager, and some kind of replacement for the VLT which are completely missing. These are foundation stones of the "archive solution" which I and others were sold and bought into, but for Mac users at least this mission-critical functionality that we rely on Silverfast for is only available when using an obsolete operating system. I'm never in a hurry to update OS, but there are now pressing reasons to update to Lion, and of course even Lion will shortly be obsolete. This is all very disappointing, especially as no roadmap has been communicated, and we may well be in this situation for years. I'm resigned to the fact that there will never be support beyond OS X 10.6.8 for the Minolta Multi Pro scanner, and have dedicated an old laptop to running that and outputing HDR scans to my main imaging computer. But I want to process these scans in my main, fully colour managed environment. Apart from a few nice to have details, with some work there is nothing that I can do in HDR that I cannot do in Photoshop, so the selling point for me are these preview and job management features. Of course the basic Silverfast algorithms and tools still get me where I want to go faster, and often better, than Photoshop, but that's not enough.

So, are we nearly there yet? I'm sure you'd like to be able to take our money for a production release almost as much as we'd like to give it to you. Can you at least give a general idea of when you expect the release date to be?

Thanks for allowing this dscussion...

Best wishes
David Mantripp

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear Mr Mantripp,

SilverFast HDR Studio is not finished yet.
It is still in development and we are constantly adding features.
A final release date unfortunately is not yet available.

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

[drm]

The current version (r14) has now expired.

This is not very encouraging...

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Sorry about that.

The next update (r15) will be available very soon.

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

[drm]

Great, thanks - and I've just discovered that the Zoom tool works now