I’m willing to help with this. I was a contract build engineer at Apple in Cupertino. I did a Qt project on Windows/Mac/Linux in 2011. I’m the Principal Contributor on Exiv2, so I don’t want to get sucked into another project on a long-term basis. However, I’ll be happy to help out with this task if you’re stuck.
The puzzle you’ve mentioned sounds familiar. I think I had to add a command to the Qt application .pro file to modify the install_name of several libraries to get it to run from /Applications.
The two tools to use are:
$ tool -L "/Applications/Luminance HDR 2.5.0.app/Contents/MacOS/L*"
and
$ install_name_tool "/Applications/Luminance HDR 2.5.0.app/Contents/MacOS/L*"
The output from those commands reveals where the application is searching for libraries on launch. The dynamic loader is documented in man dyld You’ll find it useful to set the environment variable DYLD_PRINT_LIBRARIES and launch Luminance from the terminal:
$ env DYLD_PRINT_LIBRARIES=1 "/Applications/Luminance HDR 2.5.0.app/Contents/MacOS/L*"
We can discuss this off-line: robin@clanmills.com