The Photomatix route is a little different. When you first open the program, you’re greeted with a small dialog box that shows buttons for generating an HDR image, exposure blending, and batch processing. It even offers a tutorial! For now, though, we’re just going to select “Generate HDR image.” Browse for your previously color-corrected and uniform files (it will almost certainly accept anything, remember), select them all, and hit OK. If you’ve got too many shots, or if you have multiple with the same exposure level, it may warn you and ask you to adjust them; in those cases, I tend to just remove the extra images it thinks have the same exposure and move on.
When it accepts the images, it brings you to an options dialog, where you can ask it to align (again, try not to, but if need be, go for it), reduce ghosting artifacts like moving objects or background ripples, and choices for the color profiles. If you’ve shot in RAW and imported it as such, you’ll get options for manually setting white balance here, as well as what color space you’d like the program to use; if you’ve imported other file types like PSD or JPEG, you’ll have options to take the tone curve of the color profile, let Photomatix try to reverse-engineer the tone curve, or use no tone curve. You’ll usually want to take the color profile’s tone curve.
If you’ve told it to align the source images, you have an option nearby that will allow you to tell Photomatix not to crop your sources, which you can use to avoid losing extraneous image parts before you get a chance to see them.
Once you’ve done all that, click OK and it will convert your images, combine them, and create your HDR shot; this, again, is where your tone mapping will then happen. Right now, a large image is on your screen, and it doesn’t look particularly good; Photomatix kindly has an explanation right there for you, however, telling you, “Standard monitors can not directly display the large range of information available in an unprocessed HDR image. Processing the HDR image through tone mapping will reveal the image details in highlights and shadows.” Well then… guess what we’re going to do? You got it, click that nice fancy “Tone Mapping” button they’ve so kindly provided for us.
The image will get a little smaller so we can get a faster preview experience, but you’ll notice it already looks a great deal better. From here you can choose to enhance details or compress a tone via the tabs at the top; I most frequently deal with detail enhancement. Here you can tell Photomatix how strong you want the effect to be, which will affect how equally the different parts of the image look, color saturation, smoothing and luminosity; towards the bottom, you have tone, color, micro contrast and smoothing, and shadow and highlight tabs with options.
Tone settings will let you adjust the overall brightness and darkness amounts, color will let you adjust image temperature and some finer saturation control, and highlights and shadows will let you smooth or clip those values. The image updates in realtime, so there’s no better way to familiarize yourself with the functions than throwing the sliders all over the place and seeing how it changes.
When you’ve selected the options you want, hit process, and it shall be so! Photomatix will tone map for you and spit out an image you can save in 8-bit JPEG or 8- or 16-bit TIFF formats. Once you’ve done so, you’re free again to go tool with it however you like in your normal post-processing routine again.
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