There are two options for tonemapping in PM. It’s the same image and the same input files were used for consistency. It would kind of defeat the purpose to use that same file for testing PM so I’m going to use a file that was merged in HDR Pro. In the previous instalment on CS5 HDR Pro, I used an HDR file that had been merged in PM. Let’s get into how the program works with an existing 32 bit file. In the RAW tab you can set up defaults for white balance and colour space when importing RAW files into PM directly. I believe HDRSoft have plans to enhance multi-core support for the merging/alignment functions in the future. It doesn’t impact the merging of the source files (including alignment) or the Exposure Fusion option (more on that later). Multi-core support only comes into play with tonemapping. In my situation, with a dual core processor it defaults to 2. In the General tab, you can set up, among other things, how many cores the program uses to process. In the program preferences (View>Preferences) you can set up some default working conditions. (click for larger version) PM Tonemapping GUI. Below are two screen captures showing the interface when the program is launced and when a file is open for tonemapping. Multiple monitor support would be a postive since a growing number of photographers do use multiple monitors. Interestingly, when you’re in tonemapping mode, you can move the histogram to a second screen. It does not fully support multiple monitors which means that you can’t get a nice big, full screen version of the image to tonemap because some of the screen real estate is taken up with the tonemapping panel. The Photomatix GUI is pretty utilitarian. ![]() It would be nice if the folks at HDRSoft would incorporate these choices into their own export dialogue. In order to get the files properly tagged, you need to go to File>Export, choose Photomatix Pro on the left and you’ll be presented with the option to select file type (using the File>Export>Plugin Extras>Export to Photomatix Pro, the file type is automatically TIFF and 16 bit, no choices), bit depth and colour space. If you then open the tonemapped file for further editing you’ll be presented with the Missing Profile warning. You can go to File>Plugin Extras>Export to Photomatix Pro but using this, what might seem the logical route, doesn’t give you the option to tag the input files. There are two routes in LR to export the files. If you’re using the LR plugin to load files into PM, it’s a bit wonky to get the files tagged with a profile. Your choices are sRGB, AdobeRGB and ProPhotoRGB. If you load RAW files into PM directly, you can choose what colour space to assign to the primary input files. ![]() You can tag your HDR files with a colour space so that everything stays in a colour managed loop from start to finish. For users of LR this is a convenient workflow though. Using this route, your speed will be limited by how fast Lightroom converts the files. The Lightroom plugin for Photomatix uses LR to convert the RAW files to TIFF before loading to PM. You can load RAW files into it and it will interpret the RAW files but it works faster if you load it with TIFFs even though the TIFF files are much larger. When creating a merged HDR file, Photomatix works best with TIFF files. Until HDR Pro in CS5, it was certainly the fastest I’ve used but now it seems that CS5 has moved to the top step in terms of speed. Photomatix has always been reasonably fast in terms of loading and processing a bracketed sequence, applying tonemapping adjustments and rendering out the tonemapped LDR file. ![]() It’s been continually improved over time and integration with other applications has been added (more later). Photomatix is probably the most used HDR application out there. Instalment two in this series is to look at Photomatix Pro from HDRSoft.
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