It was Friday night, and after everyone was off to bed, I finally got my chance to transfer my “110204 Chester Springs (Rt. 401) Field” images from my camera, converted from cr2 RAW to DNG and into Lightroom for evaluation.
On another computer, I fired up my test virtual machine (VM) and installed HDRSoft.com’s Photomatix.
I have seen many images done with Photomatix, and what normally comes to my mind, is the surrealistic side of HDR images, which seems to be the “in thing” to do these days.
Most of the time, I think, the surrealistic effects are over done, and have been a main reason I have not tried Photomatix before.
When I loaded my first single exposure, and started to play with the first few pre-sets, I realized that I had been sadly mistaken by my preconceptions.
Having worked with several HDR packages before, including Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS5 and HDRLabs.com’s Picturenaut, I found the Photomatix application to be very fast, even in a Virtual Machine.
I was very happy that I could open/import a DNG file, instead of converting it to TIFF like one has to do for Picturenaut 3.0.
The GUI interface was easy to work with and allowed for very easy adjustments. I do wish, that the sliders had a little more control, in that one could enter a number or use the arrow keys to make finer adjustments.
When playing with the various pre-sets, I could easily understand why people would succumb to the surreal side. It is quick and easy, and makes for a dynamic looking image.
In my initial steps, I selected a preset that was close to what I wanted, and then used the various sliders to tweak my image from there. Photomatix also allows you to easily save your custom pre-set for later use.
I also imported a multi-exposure HDR image from (5) DNG files, and again found the application to be quicker than Adobe Photoshop CS5.
When finished with Tone Mapping, I was able to save the image out as 16-bit TIFF file (there are 8-bit and jpeg options). A nice additional option, is that after processing your image, Photomatix will open the image in an external editor, such as Photoshop!
I have only worked on four image so far, but I plan to add Photomatix to my regular HDR/RAW work-flow.
