Neat thing to try with Photomatix Pro

This isn't what I bought Photomatix for, came across this by accident when I dropped a RAW file into the program by mistake. You can produce some quite nice arty HDR images with it and the process is quite simple.

First of all, make sure you're camera is set to take photographs in a RAW format. I usually shoot everything in RAW (NEF files on Nikon equipment).

My latest image processed with Photomatix Pro is of the historic building 'The House That Moved' here in Exeter.

To the right you will see the original image, I haven't altered it at all - this is how it came out of the camera.

First of all just drag the RAW file into Photomatix, as shown below....

 As you can see the image now looks very dark. If you move your mouse around the image you can view all the information that is available within the RAW file.

The next thing to do is to click on Tone Mapping, which you can access through the HDR tab at the top or by pressing Ctrl+T.

This opens up another window with lots of different setting sliders for altering the image... as you can see in the following screen shot.

Below you can see the settings used to create my image.... I was intending to set the colour saturation to 0 to produce a black and white image, decided that I small amount of colour would work quite well.

After you have picked your settings, quite simply save the image and run it in some photo editing software such as photoshop to put the final touches to it. This particular image wasn't fully in focus so I've run the unsharp mask filter on it plus changed the levels slightly. I had another play around with various black and white filters, but ended up leaving it with the washed out colour as I liked before in Photomatix.

Below is the end result........

For more information about HDR please click here.