It’s another option if you want natural looking images from well-exposed originals. Fusion/Natural specializes in managing the contrast and the color in the image and not a lot else. If your bracketed photos are already well-exposed, this would be a quick way to blend them together quickly.ĥ.
Tone Compressor is even simpler, with only four controls plus the color management and blending modes. It’s probably a good choice when you have to process a lot of photos quickly (or automatically), without spending a lot of time fine-tuning them.Ĥ. This mode can be used for commercial real estate and architectural photography as well as landscapes. It is a good option to use if you want to combine photos but want to keep a more natural-looking image. You can use this when you don’t need all the options in Details Enhancer and you’re most interested in controlling contrast without dealing with texture or noise.ģ. Contrast Optimizer is simpler with only six control sliders plus the new color tools. It also has a significant learning curve.Ģ. If you like to control things, Details Enhancer is your best option. This workflow includes things like Smooth Highlights, Micro-smoothing, separate saturation controls for highlights and shadows, clipping of shadows, and color controls (HSL settings). The rest are creative and refining options built on those settings.
Here, the first three options ( Strength, Tone Compression, and Detail Contrast) manage the overall HDR look.
Details Enhancer specializes in enhancing fine detail in your merged image and is probably the preferred workflow for most HDR artists. Photomatix has 8 workflows plus one tool to select a pair of images to import:ġ. You select one of the options and that determines the workflow that you will use for that image. Under HDR Settings, Photomatix offers several settings options or, as I think of them, workflows. The organization of HDR workflows changed in Photomatix’s last upgrade. Which leads us to Photomatix’s most unique (and for beginners, possibly the most confusing) feature. In Photomatix, tapping on a preset quickly changes the preview AND shows which of the HDR flow settings you can use to create that style. Since they are a selective collection, it is easy to see the major differences between them, even in the smaller versions in the gallery, plus they are organized together with names that actually mean something (as opposed to Aurora, which has presets organized by their creator and the names often mean nothing). The ability to merge the finished edited version with any of the original images, again with the ability to select specific areas with the brush tool, andĪfter you merge your brackets, you see the merged image with a gallery of 34 color and 7 black and white presets.A brush tool to selectively apply color corrections to selected areas.New Saturation, Hue and Brightness controls (equivalent to other programs’ Hue, Saturation and Luminance, or HSL controls), very similar to the controls in both Aurora and Adobe Camera Raw.When Photomatix came out with Version 6 early last fall, there were a number of new and very useful features, including:
Photomatix also allows you to view and save the full HDR image after your photos are merged (but only then).Īnd all this is before you’ve even started editing the image.
If you handheld your camera for your bracketed exposures, neither of these two programs offer manual manipulation of one or more brackets as do a few other HDR programs.Īnd, if you are merging Raw camera images, there are a couple of options that pop up for white balance and color space in Photomatix.
This is especially useful when using higher ISO settings on your camera.
Noise control (not in Aurora) allows you to choose to remove noise: only on the underexposed image or images, the regular and underexposed images, or all or none of the images. Photomatix also gives you a bit more control in aligning the images. You can also manually select areas to deghost, which is not an option in Aurora. Photomatix has, for example, more de-ghosting options, including the ability to preview ghosts to see how bad the ghosting is, allowing you to determine the intensity of the process. And those differences start as soon as you load your photos. Trying both Photomatix Pro and Aurora HDR, you are first struck by differences in the user experience. How Photomatix Stays Relevant Against Aurora HDR