There are a couple things I’d like to note about these two particular programs: Photoshop is a lot more versatile and powerful overall, as it always has been, but Photomatix was very clearly designed to do one thing and to do it well, and that is make you easy, good-looking HDR images. The Photomatix workflow is simple and elegant, it’s a simple two steps to get from your component source images to a final HDR shot, and it even has a batch processing mode, where you can just throw groups of files at it and walk away to do something else. For those that like to tinker, Photoshop is the way to go, but if you’ve gotta get something done quick and easy, Photomatix is certainly both of those things. As far as pricing goes, Photomatix itself goes for $99 US, and they even offer a Photoshop CS2/CS3 plugin for their tone mapping algorithms that they sell for $69. Photoshop, of course, goes for $250 on a good day, and frequently higher than that, but as I said, contains far more functionality than just HDR creation. Both are great tools in anybody’s photography arsenal.
There you have it! Two different ways to turn these:
into this:
Now get off the sidelines, dust off the camera, and go capture some of your own HDRs – maybe we’ll all be lusting after your shot in a week or two!
Articles RSS