Coupon Code

Before we get started, go to the HDRsoft (the company that makes Photomatix) and download a trial version to run along with this post. That way you can try it out for yourself before you buy it. If you plan on purchasing Photomatix Pro or any other software from HDRsoft, be sure to use the coupon code “JamesBrandon” to receive a 15% discount off your purchase. You can go directly to their purchase page or their home page if you want to find out more.

Photomatix Pro Review and Tutorial (Current Version 3 and BETA Version 4)

Photomatix Pro is a stand alone software program that takes bracketed exposures from your camera and combines them to create an HDR (high dynamic range) image. The main reason you would want to create an HDR image is when there is too much contrast in a scene to capture all the light that can be realized by the human eye. Take for example the image below:

If you simply took a picture of this plane, with a normal camera, in broad daylight, it would look like this:

You see how it’s not about the camera? Anybody could take this picture. I didn’t have special access to this plane, I was a tourist with a camera. I walked up to the plane, set up my tripod, and fired off three shots of this jet.

Now, this is where Photomatix comes in. Photomatix Pro will take my three exposures and run a complex algorithm on them to pull out the best light from each image. When you set up for an HDR image you take anywhere from 3-7 images of the same subject at different light levels. When I took this image, all I needed was three. There wasn’t enough contrast to warrant any more than that.

The first image is properly exposed, the second is two stops under exposed (to gather detail from the sky), and the third image is two stops over exposed (to gather light in the shadows). Take these three images from Lightroom, Aperture, or whatever program you might be using, and open them up in Photomatix Pro. No matter what program you use to send your images over, you will get a pop-up window that is going to ask a few questions.

If you’re a beginner, some of these options might be useful to you. I don’t use any of them because I can fix any faults of the image later in Photoshop.

Align Images – If you aren’t using a tripod while you take your 3-7 images, you will have to click this box. The best way to align is by correcting horizontal and vertical shifts in the images. Having Photomatix crop the resulting image is probably a good idea too if you took the shots hand held.

Reduce ghosting artifacts – This is an option that will attempt to fix issues with moving subjects. If you take a picture of a sky while birds are flying across it, you will find that Photomatix won’t be able to tell which image to blend in to the final product. All 3-7 images will have birds in 3-7 different locations so you will get these weird, blurry streaks across the image. This is especially a problem with long exposures.

Reduce Noise – If you don’t have any other means of reducing noise, you can check that box as well. I use Topaz DeNoise 4 to reduce noise at the final stage of my editing, so I don’t want any other noise reduction until then. Why? Because noise reduction removes details and I want to preserve as much detail as I can until the last step.

Reduce Chromatic Aberrations – This is a complicated one for most people. Chromatic Aberrations are these colored distortions that you get in your image when your cameras lens fails to focus all the colors at the same convergence point. If you take a picture of a sky and there are trees in the frame, the camera can’t compensate for the extreme contrast between the sky, and the tree. This is because there is too much dynamic range of light between the two subjects.

Show intermediary 32-bit HDR image – Don’t worry about this one.

Automatically re-import into Lightroom library – This is obviously if you are using Lightroom. I don’t use this option ever.

Now that you have checked or unchecked all the boxes, click “Export.” Now you just have to wait a minute. Photomatix Pro is working through a complex algorithm to decide which light from each image to include in the final version. Depending on your system and how many images are involved, this can take anywhere from 1-5 minutes, maybe even more. Once Photomatix is done processing your image, a box may pop up that doesn’t look like an HDR image at all. This is another confusing part to some people but just click tone mapping to get to the next part. When you do you will be taken here:

The image in the window above is the final result I got after moving the sliders around to the left. You may notice that this image doesn’t look the same as the final product I showed you at the beginning. Well, Photomatix isn’t the last step . I like to say that Photomatix gives me a rough draft. It gets me about half way there, if that. A few tips on the sliders…

• I keep strength at 100% almost all the time
• Color saturation should be pretty high most of the time as well. It just depends.
• Luminosity will control how bright the image looks. The further right you go, the more HDRish the image will become. This can be a bad thing.
• Microcontrast will control contrast of the image but only in a subtle way.
• Smoothing probably has the greatest effect over the image. The further left you go, the more psychedelic the image is going to look. Also, the further left you go, the more problems you will run into with haloing (I’ll get into that more in another tutorial).
• Under “Tone Settings” there are sliders called White Point, Black Point, and Gamma. These sliders control the amount of light and shadows in the image and as you move these sliders around, you will see the histogram on the left being affecting by moving right or left. Histograms are a whole other blog post, so stay tuned! Just know that the histogram needs to look similar to the one above, with no data bunched up on the right or left side. It should look a bit like a mountain where the bottom of the mountain is on each side of the chart.

The rest of the sliders are either self explanatory, or make very minor changes to the image. You will have to go through each slider and play around with them to get a feel for what does what. I never leave the sliders in the same place for every image. They are all different and they all call for different tones, vibrance levels, saturation, etc. Once you are happy with the look of the image click “Process.” You’re done! After Photomatix processes the image it appear as a finished version and stay on the screen. To save it somewhere, go up to File>Save As and create a unique name for it and place it in a folder that you will be able to find.

Summary

Photomatix is a very powerful tool for creating HDR images. I have used a few other programs and this is the best in my opinion. You won’t be able to get into HDR photography without purchasing custom software that your computer doesn’t come with. Remember, if your going to purchase Photomatix, you can get 15% off by using the coupon code “JamesBrandon” at checkout. Here is a link again to their ordering page and website. If you aren’t sure yet, you can simply download the trial version and try it out. What do you have to lose!? If you have any further questions, tweet me at @jamesdbrandon and I will get to the question as soon as I can. You can also leave a comment in this post. Have fun!

Quick Overview of Photomatix 4.0 BETA

Photomatix has recently released a private version of their BETA 4.0 software to select Photographers. While this version isn’t public yet, if you purchase version 3 right now, HDRsoft will provide an upgrade when the final 4.0 is released. I can tell you that 4.0 is great! It has a lot of really good improvements and it is a LOT faster! There are also options for semi-manual ghosting correction, options for presets, and better noise reduction to name a few. I am using it exclusively right now but still used the previous version for this tutorial to avoid confusion (since the new version looks slightly different).