Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: daniel voges on October 16, 2008, 03:57:11 am

Title: HDR
Post by: daniel voges on October 16, 2008, 03:57:11 am

Hi, I am using Photoshop CS2 at the moment for HDR, just want ask, is Photomatix worth it or is Photoshop good enough for creating HDR images.

Title: HDR
Post by: michaelbiondo on October 16, 2008, 05:46:00 am

I use Photomatrix quite a bit and I like it. I find the tone mapping interface a bit more userfriendly, and the exposure blending can be helpful as well but the real advantage is in it's batch processing capability.

Title: HDR
Post by: rdonson on October 16, 2008, 07:45:09 am

For me there's no comparison.  HDR in Photoshop simply doesn't produce the results I'm looking for.  Photomatix is far easier to use and does the job.

Title: HDR
Post by: Ken Bennett on October 16, 2008, 08:14:27 am

Yes, for me, Photomatix was worth the cost.

Title: HDR
Post by: Tim Gray on October 16, 2008, 08:33:53 am

In my view Photoshop is a non starter for HDR, and I use Photomatix, however, I'm finding that the enfuse plug in for lightroom provides a more natural looking blend, but with significant processing overhead.  (but it's available for a modest donation).

Title: HDR
Post by: bill t. on October 17, 2008, 06:09:15 pm

Quote from: Tim Gray

In my view Photoshop is a non starter for HDR, and I use Photomatix, however, I'm finding that the enfuse plug in for lightroom provides a more natural looking blend, but with significant processing overhead.  (but it's available for a modest donation).

There is a variation on Enfuse called Tufuse which offers a graphical user interface and considerably more control than the original Enfuse program.  As Tim says both those programs produce a very natural looking result without the heavy saturation and noise that is typical of Photomatix.  Tufuse is a stand-alone program, and BTW there is also a stand-alone version of Enfuse.

Photomatix does do a better job than Enfuse/Tufuse on blown-out prone areas like brilliant skies, windows etc and sometimes there is some advantage to using in those types of situations especially if you are in a hurry.  But with some masking and a dark exposure layer you can still get a better result with Enfuse/Tufuse with only a little more work.

If you are doing any sort of stitching Tufuse is by far the best choice since it produces excellent frame to frame consistency whereas Photomatix seems to apply different heuristics to each frame, which makes your exposure set harder to balance out.

http://www.tawbaware.com/tufuse.htm (http://www.tawbaware.com/tufuse.htm)