Anyone here using Photomatix?

Is it easy, difficult, good, bad, is there better?

It looks ok, but I read that settings are a bit tricky...

I know some who do I don't

I have use EHDR  and  Dynamic Photo HDR

Both I find very good and easy to use.  I thing I like with both is you can just use 1 raw file, the software with work it out for you. 

I have Topaz Adjust..I like it as it works well on jpegs.
Settings are easy and it not over done adds some extra ooomph to an image.

I have not seen Topaz Adjust before it looks very good I'm going to have a go at it.

Regarding "Topaz Adjust"....

NOTE TO TOPAZ LABS:

Although your product looks very interesting, I sincerely hope that the designers of your product are NOT the same ones that designed your homepage.  Your homepage took exactly SIX (6) minutes to load via 56k dial-up....normally, I would have clicked away 5 1/2 minutes earlier, but I thought I would humor myself to see how long it actually took.  Sorry, but I didn't have the patience for any further clicks on your site. 

Sincerely;
A once interested, but not that patient potential customer.....

Hi gradient,
I never  had any problem with the Topaz page opening and my system is about 5 years old so no I havent got the latest mega system and I can only get 2 MB on broadband.
Give it another try.
Eddie

There's a big difference between a 2 million bites connection and a 56 thousand one.
The first, in slow connections and heavy traffic goes seldom below some 70-80 thousand. The second one, in the same situation, often drops to 1 thousand bites.

Some pages are indeed badly designed.

This said: I'm quite shure that most of the Topaz effects can easily be achieved with a max of four Photoshop layers with blendmodes. This is not real tonemapping but edgecontrast larded with rather extreme levels. For the price of the plug-in though, $39, added you get a free copy of the noise reduction, it's certainly worth getting if you're into this kind of effects.

Hi Tanchelyn,
Yes like a lot of plug ins it can be pushed to extreme levels which in my view completely destroys the image but used in a subtle way in my view ( for what it's worth ) it does give a gentle boost to the image.
Plus the fact that a lot of us don't know how to acheive the effect with blend modes so if you could point us in the right direction or a tutorial some of us would appreciate it greatly.
I did once find a tutorial on this and didnt have time to read it at the time and was convinced I added it to favourites in explorer to go back to later but never found it again.
Eddie

Give me a few days and if I forget: remind me!
I'll either cook something that matches (approcimately) or buy the plug.
And that's a promise.

Topaz looks interesting..perhaps a bit more about Tone mapping..

EHDR..that's a new one for me..looks decent tho..

Photomatix...Have used it..It does HDR well..less impressed with the tone mapping, but does what it says it does..

Dynamic Photo HDR ..works well..More options in tone mapping..price is right..
(I mentioned this product to our contest staff, and they are one of the sponsors of our Halloween contest, so someone will win a copy of this)

I do agree that much of this can be accomplished with Photoshop..However, If oe is looking to streamline the process from beginning to end..a program or plug-in like this is a great tool.

I found a few tutorials

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/high-dynamic-range.htm

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/HDR_ps/hdr-ps.htm

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/hdr.shtml

I fully agree.

The whole "effect" (this is not real tone-ranging!) is based on more detail in the shadowy but not black areas and the ligher, but not highlight areas and leave the middle range  untouched. Black and white need to stay untouched.

The idea is to load a channel as a layer mask to influence the luminance, so you can control  how much and to which hues you apply a curve (or whatever).

Have one layer to influence the dark "greys" by inverting the mask and level it to more black and white with less greys in between, and one other to influence the light "greys" by leveling the non-inverted mask.

A very rough and quick first attempt:

I started with this:

@ejn;
If I could get access to a 2MB connection where I live, I would be dancing "nekkidd" in the streets!

@Tanchelyn; nice work!

Hi Tanchelyn,
Any chance you could explain the different layers and what you did with them...sorry if I seem a bit thick...put it down to old age
Eddie**
**

OK. So here we go.

First of all when I look at one of those tonemapped images I see that they have deep blacks, bright whites, a normal midrange hues but better, much better shadow detail and light hues details.
So what we have to do is influence those two areas of hues: shadows and, let's call them brights.

We cannot use curves to get the full effect as curves is too general. We cannot use blend modes as these are even more general. We really have to use a mask that protects all we don't want to influence. And because we're not taliking about area's, we cannot paint it.

So what we do is use a so-called luminance mask. This means: we go to the channels panel and click the three channels (in RGB). The one with the best contrast is the one we now need. Here this was, as often, the blue channel. We copy that one by dragging it to copy, just like with layers and, with the copy active we click the dotted circle icon at the bottom, meaning we load it as a selection.

Then we click back on the composite (rgb) channel, evt. deactivate the copy (that is considered a mask and turns everything reddish), and we go back to layers.

In layers, we make a copy of our background and we add a layer mask (icons at the bottom of the panel). Immediately, the selected channel is loaded as a mask. Now this is great!

All we now have to do is click to select this mask and then tweak it. Frist, make another layer that's a copy of this copy-with mask so yopu can always reuse it. And hide it.
Just for fun, try some weird commands like, for example, desaturate or invert. You'll notice that the dark parts are less influenced the darker they are, and the bright parts are more influenced the brighter they are. (try this, and then use CtrlZ or CmdZ to undo).

This is exactly what we need. 

On the active copy, select the mask by clicking on it and open levels. Drag the sliders so everything becomes black except the brighter areas. But keep a soft transition.

Create another copy, click the mask to select it and, just like any other image (a mask is an image) invert it. Because in the inverted image the lighter greys are dark and the shadows are bright, we can, with this mask, easily use levels to make everything dark except the bright shadow areas.

Now we have the two basic layers to influence brights and shadows. Click on each layer to select it and, for example, use curves to make areas brighter or darker. Thanks to the masks, the influence is accented and limited to where we want it.

Some extra work can be done with other layers and with adjustment layers (these can always be tweaked afterwards, but influence all what's below them).

This is the idea. Now let's get practical for this image:

I have Topaz Adjust and use it as part of my regular workflow.  Great plugin!

There's  another alternative called Redynamix ...only 16 bucks.  Well worth it!  You can try before you buy it as well.

www.mediachance.com/plugins/redynamix.html

Another product to consider is Photo Acute.

It gives decent results for up-rezzing, DR, HDR, focus stacking, etc.  You can download a trial version.

Regards,

Steve