HDR Photograph of a library at Angkor Wat
Over recent weeks in this phototip series I’ve looked a couple of times at different HDR software and how they work. The genre in general is still in its infancy and a lot of the available software is too. For that reason, many photographers will eagerly try new offerings from different software companies. At this stage, there doesn’t really seem to be an “industry-standard”. Photomatix may come the closest by virtue of it being the most mature application. In today’s tip, I’m going to take a quick look at different ones at their default settings as that is the first thing you’ll see if you try a new piece of software. It goes without saying that in most cases you’re not going to use the default, but if one application gives a default that is closer to what you want your final vision to be, then that’s going to be a huge time saver. I will also note that I don’t go in for the hyper-real cartoonish type look, preferring a more photo-realistic image, so bear that in mind when you view the photographs below. In instances where an application offers a variety of presets, I’m just going to use the default preset it opens with. I used a three-exposure sequence bracketed at -2, 0, +2. I applied a crop before the HDR process. The opening image (above) has had some additional edits done – can anyone guess which of the following it was based on?
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Photomatix Pro
Photoshop CS5 Merge To HDR
Dynamic Photo HDR
Nik HDR Efex Pro
HDR Expose
HDR Darkroom
There you have it. It’s interesting to see how widely the defaults differ in different software applications.
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