Photomatix Pro

Have you ever photographed a beautiful landscape on a bright sunny day to get a completely white, illuminated sky? Or vice versa, by changing the exposure to get a blue sky and completely black everything else? The fact that the dynamic range of any digital camera is limited, and is much narrower than the range of the human eye, which can also adapt to the light. Simply put, the dynamic range is the distance from the lightest point to the darkest point that the camera can save. Bright skies and dark plans or shadows are just beyond this distance.

In this situation Photomatix Pro software will help. This is a program for creating HDR images from multiple photos with different exposures. It can also create a pseudo-HDR from a single RAW file and mix exposures - Exposure Fusion. HDR (High Dynamic Range) is essentially a format of images with a very large dynamic range, much larger than the monitor can be played back. Photomatix Pro uses tone compression algorithms to create a regular JPEG (or TIFF, if further processing is planned) with evenly distributed brightness from the resulting HDR image.

Photomatix Pro enables photographers to create High Dynamic Range (HDR) images, presenting a far greater dynamic range than a typical monitor can illustrate.

In practice, it's a lot easier than in theory. When photographing a complex scene, for example, with a bright sky, three shots are taken with different exposures, so that one photo has black shadows, the other neutral and the third bright. The easiest way to do this is to set up the camera on a tripod and set up automatic exposure bracketing (AEB), this mode is available on almost all modern cameras, with a difference of 1/3 - 2 steps and to make a picture. Then open the resulting photos in Photomatix. The program is based on EXIF information and will automatically offer optimal settings, align frames and correct possible camera shifts during shooting. After opening the photos in the program window, you can select several presets with settings or adjust the image manually. A large number of controls allow you to fine-tune all the nuances of the future HDR image: choose the method of merging exposure, adjust the brightness/shadow ratio, adjust the level of tone compression, level of detail, and so on.

Beginner photographers should remember that the best treatment is one that is invisible. It is better to avoid too acidic colors and bright halos on the borders of contrasting objects, which appear when setting the extreme values of some controls.