[Toad]

A few of the people on the site - most notably Irma and Guerito, but more recently Adam have been posting HDR shots that are realy very impressive. I finally decided to see what they are up to, and downloaded the Photomatix Pro trial package from their website.

I have to say I'm impressed. I have been converting using different exposures of the same RAW photos and the results are pretty cool. Using this different exposure technique from the same RAW frame isn't as good working from multiple braketed photos, but it is much simpler than bracketing as you need only one shot to do it. That way, I can also browse through my library and look for shots that can be saved by this technique. The flaw is that you cannot recreate badly blown highlights and you get a lot of noise in very dark areas when you overexpose the RAW. This would never happen if you had multiple shots each exposing part of the picture correctly. But what the hey...it's good enough for a test, and for shots where the difference between the highlights and the shadows is not too great, it works fine.

Here are a couple of shots from my New York junket that were idle in my junk photo file because they were basically unusable without spending a LONG LONG time in PhotoShop on each one to fix the exposure. For each one, I saved 2 exposures from the same RAW file, one exposed for the highlights and one for the shadows - which is about as basic as it gets in HDR processing.

I am definately going to buy this software. BTW: the trial download is fully functional and does not expire - but the final shots are watermarked all over the place with the PhotoMatix logo. This is a great way to demo software and I wish more companies would adapt this anti-piracy technique. At least then, you can actually test the software before purchasing.