Sean Esopenko

HDR with Photomatix: First Impressions

June 13, 2010

I’ve tried out Photomatix 3.2 to process HDR images of some of the photographs from yesterday’s shoot at the Calgary Brewery.  It’s much easier to push the microcontrast further than Adobe’s HDR Merge can with Photomatix, if that’s the image you’re going for.

It’s a little simpler to use, as well. The Details Enhancer tone mapping mode gives you various sliders to play with and it renders previews as you move them around. If you want that super-grainy micro-contrast look then slide the Strength and Microcontrast sliders way up. You can tweak them to give a more natural or unnatural look, depending on your preference.

It also introduced a lot of strange noise in the form of bright white, red and blue pixels. There were about 40-50 of these in the processed photograph. It added about 30 minutes to the time to process one image because of the time spent cloning over the artifacts.  I think they have to spend more time working on their RAW importer but if you’re looking for super-processed HDR images, Photomatix is the way to go.

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