Photomatix Pro is a wonderfully easy software package to use. Select the images you want to use to create your HDR image, click on a button, and it's done. Click another button to tone-map the HDR image back into an image that will look good on paper or your computer screen, and it's done again. It's so easy your spouse's mouth-breathing brother could do it.
Unless that mouth-breathing in-law is also a man of sensitive artistic taste and deft skill, the results will look awful. That's where the program becomes more demanding. It gives you two options for tone-mapping, one that enhances details, another that takes a more global approach. To explain just a little, your HDR image is like a negative, full of information that has to be interpreted into a positive before the picture looks good. The detail enhancing tone-mapper brings out every little detail on that negative, high-lighting the transitions from brick to brick, leaf to leaf, and stripping away shaddows to reveal what might be hiding in the dark. The more global technique de-emphasizes those details in favor of creating a smoother image, one where the over-all balance of shaddow and light in the negative is the focus. The result is more photographic.
You might think then that the artistic decision is in deciding which tone-mapper to use. Wrong. Each tone-mapping option comes with a variety of sliders to adjust things like contrast, luminosity, the intensity of whites and blacks, color temperature and so on. Choose wisely and you can get beautiful results with either tone-mapping option. Those gorgeous images you see in the how-to books are well on their way to being realized on your computer screen. Choose badly and you get garish, eye-watering results. Look at HDR images on-line and the great majority fall into that second category. The problem is that very few of us are both tasteful and technically proficient artists.
There are ways to make up for artistic deficiencies. Photomatix comes with pre-sets that allow you to choose your look - painterly, grungy, standard photographic. Think of those as frozen dinner equivalents. They can actually look pretty good, just not as staggeringly good as the examples in the books. They can't make you a good photographer, and they can't capture the subtleties you might have seen when you saw the scene you decided to photograph. But they can get you on your way to seeing what the software can do. Ultimately, you'll have to play with the sliders and figure out what works for you. Buy some how-to books and try their "recipes" and then get creative. Just understand that it will take time and effort to become a chef and get a feel for which ingredients will go well in which images.
Photomatix can only do so much. I think that at some point you'll want to do more fixing in Photoshop or another program if your aim is gallery-quality prints. I have no doubt that Photomatix is the way to go to create the initial HDR negative, and its tone-mapping functions are the way to go to create your initial positive. But then you'll move the job to Photoshop for some smoothing here, some cloning there to touch up what Photomatix's ghost-correcting function started, a bit of work to get rid of halos around buildings, then the application of some tools to enhance your artistic vision. You'll do more than 90% of the work in Photomatix though, and for most photos that will probably be enough.
I'm still very much in the learning phase with this program, but I'm having a great time learning to use it. My results are nowhere near the pictures in the how-to books, but it took only a couple of hours of playing with it to get results I really liked. HDR isn't for every situation or for every subject, but in the right situation, it adds a whole new dimension to your images. Photomatix Pro is an excellent product to get you started.
Photomatix Pro 6
4.4 | 532 ratings
Price: 49.5
Last update: 01-11-2025
About this item
Merge of bracketed exposures to HDR, tone mapping and exposure fusion
Automatic Alignment of Hand-Held Photos
Advanced Tools for Ghost Removal
Batch Mode
Plugin for Adobe Light room
Automatic Alignment of Hand-Held Photos
Advanced Tools for Ghost Removal
Batch Mode
Plugin for Adobe Light room
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