Photomatix Pro is a standalone software package designed to do Exposure Blending and HDR Tone Mapping Screen Shot. What are these?

The Exposure Blending process is the easiest to understand. This process directly combines your differently exposed photos into one image that shows details in both highlights and shadows. Unlike programs like Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3 you can choose to use a single RAW image from your camera to generate the images that you will exposure blend. Photoshop will not allow you to do this. PhotoMatix does and while not a true HDR (High Dynamic Range) image it does offer you a better looking image with better shadows and highlights. Also, because you are using the same image to generate your images you don’t have to worry about camera shake or blurring.

Photomatix offers you several options for exposure blending. Including:

• Highlights & Shadows - 2 Images: is the fastest but works only with two images and is optimized for images of 3 to 4 stops apart. They recommend that you give this method a try even when you have 3 bracketed shots. In some cases, you may find that it produces better results than when using all 3 shots using another method. Sample
• Highlights & Shadows - Auto: does not have a limitation in the number of images and stops spacing. It generally produces results that have a more natural look than other methods - which means that you may find the results a bit "flat looking". However, this method makes it hard to get a poor result. Sample
• Highlights & Shadows - Adjust: does not have a limitation in the number of images and stops spacing. The advantage of this method is that it lets you set the radius and the blending point used for the calculation. Setting a high value for the radius will make the blending more accurate, which will result in a sharper looking image. However, a higher radius increases processing times and may result in halo artifacts around strong luminosity edges. The best radius setting depends on the image and the effect you want to achieve. The blending point is used to weight the exposures differently, favoring either the dark or bright images. Sample
• Highlights & Shadows - Intensive: this is like the HDR Tone Mapping option and is intended for scenes with a particularly high dynamic range. However, as the name implies, this method is computationally intensive, i.e. have very long processing times, so it is recommend trying them only if you are not satisfied with the result of the Tone Mapping tool. Sample

None of the above options give you a true HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. The only way to do that is to use the HDR Tone Mapping option. However, true or not the above options are quick, very flexible when it comes to your image sources and can often times give you just what you want. For example if you have a shot that has very tricky lighting and you want to make sure that the shadows and the highlights come out correct using a single RAW, JPG or TIF image this option can produce very nice results.

The other process, HDR Tone Mapping, involves two steps. The first step creates an HDR image from your differently exposed photos. The second step processes the HDR image in order to reveal its details in highlights and shadows.

An HDR image generated from differently exposed photos cannot be viewed properly on standard monitors or on prints. This is because these HDR images contains a range of values from the deepest shadows to the brightest highlights that exceeds the reproduction capability of low dynamic range media such as standard monitors and inkjet printers.

This is why it is necessary to process the HDR image, mapping its tonal values so that they fit in the limited tonal range of display and printing devices. This way, the details in highlights and shadows stored in the 32-bit HDR image will then become apparent on 8-bit displays. This process is also known as Tone Mapping.

Photomatix Pro provides two methods for tone mapping an HDR image in order to reveal its details in highlights and shadows. Screen Shot One is called "Details Enhancer", the other "Tone Compressor".

Don’t think for an instant that because you end up taking this HDR image down to 8-bit or 16-bit color that this process is no better than just shooting a RAW, TIF or JPG with your camera. The creation of an HDR image gives you much more leeway when it comes to exposure than anything else currently available. The process of Tone Mapping or Tone Compressing allows you to choose what you keep and trash and it is very easy to get a final 8-bit or 16-bit image with more dynamic range than any camera can currently create. 5 Image HDR Sample 13 Image HDR Sample

When it comes time to Tone Map your HDR image Photomatix offers you a good deal of control. Including:

• Strength: Controls the strength of contrast enhancements. A value of 100 gives the maximum increase in both local and global contrast.
• Color Saturation: Controls the saturation of the RGB color channels. The greater the saturation, the more intense the color, the value affects each color channel equally.
• Light Smoothing: Controls smoothing of light variations throughout the image. A higher value tends to reduce halos and give a more natural look to the resulting image. A lower value tends to increase sharpness.
• Luminosity: Controls the compression of the tonal range, which has for effects to adjust the global luminosity level. Moving the slider to the right has the effect of boosting shadow details and brightening the image. Moving it to the left gives a more natural look to the resulting image.
• Micro-contrast: Sets the level of accentuation of local details. The default value (2) is often the optimal one.
• Micro-smoothing: Smoothes out local details enhancement. This has for effect of reducing noise in the sky for instance and tends to give a "cleaner" look to the resulting image.
• White Clip - Black Clip: Both sliders control how the minimum and maximum values of the output image are set. Moving the sliders to the right increases global contrast. Moving them to the left reduces the clipping at the extremes. The White Clipping slider sets the value for the maximum (pure white or level 255). The Black Clipping slider sets the value for the minimum (pure black or level 0).
• Gamma: Adjusts the midtone of the tone mapped image, brightening or darkening the image globally.

While Photoshop CS2 and CS3 offers you the ability to create HDR images your choice in what you use for the source images is much more limited. Blending Multiple Exposures from the same image isn’t possible unless you want to go in to layers, layer masks and layer blending modes. This is a very time consuming process to say the least.

Photomatix while not having the spiffiest interface I have ever seen is both easy to use and powerful. It is also the most flexible options available. It is also interesting to note that you can use it to combine several different images in to a collage effect using the various image adjustment controls to tweak the combining of the images. Think multiple exposures from the old film days.

If you want to get serious about HDR or multi-exposure images then PhotoMatix Pro is a very good choice. More so than Adobe Photoshop CS2 or CS3, however if you should decide to stick with Adobe Photoshop you should know that the Tone Mapping controls in PhotoMatix Pro are available as a Photoshop Plug-in. One of the very weak points of Photoshop for HDR images is the available tools for compressing or tone-mapping the 32-bit data down to 8-bit or 16-bit so with the PhotoMatix Tone-Mapping plug-in you have the same controls in Photoshop as you would in Photomatix Pro. This is a good thing, trust me. If you want to use a single image adjusted differently for the shadows and highlights PhotoMatix Pro is definitely the way to go.

HDR / Tone Mapping

• Generation of HDR (High Dynamic Range) images from differently exposed images
  • Option for automatic image alignment
  • Reading of exposure information from EXIF data.
  • Source images can be 8-bits per channel or 16-bits per channel images, or RAW files from Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, Panasonic, Minolta and Kodak, as well as DNG files.
  • In the case of RAW files, White Balance and output color space can be adjusted when images are processed with Batch Processing.
• Conversion of single RAW file into "pseudo" HDR image
  • Enables to apply the Tone Mapping tool to single RAW file.
  • White Balance can be adjusted in Preferences/Default Options.
• Tone Mapping tool for revealing highlights and shadows details in HDR image
  • Two tone mapping methods available: Details Enhancer, based on a local operator, and Tone Compressor, based on a global operator.
  • Preview enabling to adjust the following settings for Details Enhancer: Strength, Color Saturation, Light Smoothing, Luminosity, Micro-contrast, Micro-smoothing and Black and White Clipping. For Tone Compressor the settings are: Brightness, Tonal Range Compression, Contrast Adaptation and Black and White Clipping.
  • Settings can be saved to and loaded from XMP files
  • Bit-depth of output image can be either 8 or 16 bits per color channel
  • Ability to zoom the preview to get a 100% crop.
  • Option for different preview sizes (512, 768, and 1024 pixels)
  • In the case of Details Enhancer, input image can also be a 16 bits/channel image file.
  • Option for output as equirectangular image set to be viewed in a 360 degree panorama viewer in the case of Details Enhancer.
• HDR Viewer shows local HDR image data at the appropriate exposure
• Display of HDR Histogram (logarithmic)
• Ability to batch tone map single HDR images.
• Function to tone map large HDR image files while benefiting from a preview.
• Read and Write support for Radiance RGBE (.hdr), OpenEXR (.exr) and Floating Point TIFF
  
  

Exposure Blending (Combining differently exposed images)

• Five algorithms for Exposure Blending: Highlights & Shadows - 2 images, Highlights & Shadows - Auto, Highlights & Shadows - Adjust, Highlights & Shadows - Light and Highlights & Shadows - Enhanced
• Built-in automatic alignment option for out-of-register images
• Semi-manual alignment tool for difficult cases
• Averaging (also known as Image Stacking)
• Merges any number of differently exposed images (except method Highlights & Shadows - 2 images)
• Adjustment of radius and blending point settings (method Highlights & Shadows - Adjust)
• 16-bit support (except methods Highlights & Shadows - Light and Highlights & Shadows - Enhanced )

Automatic Batch Processing

• Automatically loads and processes images of the specified input location, and saves resulting images to the specified output location
• Option for automatic image alignment.
• Works for HDRI generation, Tone Mapping and all combination modes
• Access to all Tone Mapping settings, as well as loading the settings from XMP files and saving them.
• Ability to set the Exposure Value spacing for HDR Image generation
• Processes all sets of bracketed images stored under a given folder (number of bracketed images in each set specified by user before running the batch)
• Ability to select only specific files for processing
• Ability to process all sub-folders of a given folder, combining all image files stored under each sub-folder
• Option for short file names for the resulting images.
• Report lists the actions performed as they are processed and the error status

General

• Support of the following image file formats: JPEG (read & write), TIFF 24-bit, 48-bit and Floating Point (read & write), Radiance RGBE (read & write), OpenEXR (read & write), BMP (Mac version: read only, Windows version: read & write), PNG (Mac version: read & write), PSD (read only) RAW files from Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, Panasonic, Minolta and Kodak, as well as DNG files (read only)
• 48-bit compression tool: enhances shadows details of a 16 bits/channel image file
• Basic image operation tools
• Cropping (also works with HDR images)
• Resizing
• Rotating (also works with HDR images)
• Sharpening
• Brightness & Contrast
• Remapping of mirror ball (also works with HDR images)