Autumn Color

I visited Winkworth Arboretum in Surrey on 24th October and took some shots to render in HDR. The shot below was a 5 shot HDR -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 stop range. I quite like the effect of shooting straight into the afternoon sunshine

Winkworth Arboretum, Surrey

Yosemite National Park

Purchased HDR Efex Pro

Having played around with NIK Softwares HDR Efex Pro for a week or so, I decided to go ahead and buy a licence. I have Photomatix Pro 4.1 but found the ease of use of HDR Efex Pro and the photo-realistic results useful. 

The Alignment and de-ghosting features are not perfect, but they can usually be coerced into producing a good render with a little bit of experimentation.

i.e. Sometime the Alignment option is best left off when images are already aligned (e.g. taken on a tripod) and even in NIK's own documentation they make reference to de-ghosting sometimes being better off than on.

Overall I am pleased with HDR Efex Pro and being a frequent user of their other great applications I find the interface powerful and familiar.

Photomatix Pro 4 and HDR Efex Pro Comparisons

HDRSoft have released Photomatix Pro 4 and Upgrade to their excellent HDR software application. The upgrade is free to users who registered their product after March 2007. 

Some features of Version 4 are the ability to swap quickly between tone mapped and 'Fusion' renders of the scene. Fusion is unlike Tone Mapping in that it often results in more realistic looking photos that lack the traditional low contrast HDR look.

Ghosting, the enemy of many HDR fans is well handled with an Automatic and semi-automatic ghost removal option that allows the user to indicate areas of the scene that require attention by drawing a selection around them.. an interesting idea.

It is also amazingly fast. Much faster on my set up that NIK's HDR Efex Pro.

I have generated 3 examples shown below illustrating default results for Photomatix Pro 4 Tone Mapping and Fusion Mapping and HDR Efex Pro.

It is a matter of taste which version you prefer. In my opinion the HDR Efex Pro output needs the least additional work in photoshop to finish the image.

Update on Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 11:44AM by Chris Sargent

Photomatix 4 (Fusion Mapped HDR)

Photomatix 4 (Tone mapped HDR)

HDR Efex Pro (default render)

NIK HDR Efex Pro Ships

NIK Software have started to ship their HDR software - HDR Efex Pro.  I have completed a quick side by side comparison of HDR Efex Pro and Photomatix Pro and I would say that NIK is comparing very well. 

Out of the box NIK HDR Efex Pro manages very realistic and natural looking HDR renditions. There are a large number of pre-sets available to help the user 'play' with the effects possible. Each Pre-Set could be achieved through the adjustment sliders and clicking on a preset results in the sliders positioning themselves as necessary. This helps the user get to grips with the range of styles achievable quickly... although some of the pre-sets can result in some tacky looking renders :-)

HDR Efex Pro is a little slower than Photomatix on my machine (Mac Pro Quad Core 266 with 8GB RAM) but is usable...

I experimented with the software by re-visiting a recent HDR and attempting to re-render with HDR Efex Pro. The result looked better than my previous post production which was achieved after a significant amount of work in Photomatix. Here are the shots for reference, which do you prefer?

Photomatix Pro

NIK Softwares HDR Efex PRo