Friday Favorite: Photomatix Pro

I'm stilll using the beta plugin for Aperture and it still works. But I agree: The stand alone version do still the best job!

For most of HDR (like 95%) I use PM Pro. It's like Lightroom for
photo adjustment in the standard slider mode (vs. Develop mode).
Depends on your method and work flow, this is about 50-75% of image
manipulation for me.

I've been using it for over a year now, and it's awesome.

http://www.flickr.com/johnwaller/

for examples.

There's far, far, far more that can be done with HDR than these examples; I and my collaborator just published in Paleontological Electronica a quick survey paper of how to use the technique in paleo collections, and we have another paper submitted elsewhere on how to use it for much, much superior fine detail analysis for microscopic images. Currently, we get much better results assembling HDRs using FDRTools, not Photomatix Pro, although the tonemapping features of Photomatix are, usually, better than FDRTools. We're still living in hope that, one day, Hydra doesn't suck rocks, but so far, no dice.

I've also been using Hydra, gives pretty good results with no hassle - http://www.creaceed.com/hydra/ . And it has an Aperture plugin too.

I find Dynamic HDR (pc + mac) a better (or, easier) program for this...

http://www.mediachance.com/hdri/

and some of my images...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brentschmidt/sets/72157617370174131/

My opinion is that HRD images more often than not, have a fake look about them. The shadows and highlights appear to me to have been too heavily edited. Maybe that's what's intended, I just prefer a more natural looking result.

Some of my weak/decent HDR attempts..

Er, no offense, but those example shots don't look so hot. The "before" photos look much nicer. You've got that "halo" effect surrounding the bushes in one of those photos, e.g., which is a tell-tale sign of poor use of HDR.

Play with the settings a LOT, get rid of that halo edge effect. I tend to use HDR for more realistic (rather than artistic) purposes. A good example is shooting building interiors with windows. Typically you either get an overexposed window or an underexposed interior. Using HDR you can see outside the window AND inside the room.

HDR/Tone Mapped images are fun to play with, but they're pretty time consuming--even with Photomatix, and the end result, while to many people looks good, eventually as you say, gets to be old hat.

The big problem with these images is that they aren't close to being photorealistic, screaming "PCHOPED"

It's a fun effect for one or two images, but I turn my nose at people who are one-trick hdr image ponies.

The new Pentax DSLR K-7 will do this in the camera. A dedicated program will most probably give superior results but it will still be interesting to see what this promising camera can do with HDR.