My dirty little HDR secret

I hate to confess to you my dirty little HDR secret

I’m a cheater… and I’m lazy

I have my first love, Photomatix Pro 4.1 but I also see Nik HDR Efex Pro

Neither one of them knows the other exists, they’ve only passed each other in Lightroom

And on top of that, I’m lazy and impatient

Truth is, sometimes I like one and sometimes I like the other. But sometimes I think of one while I am using the other…and here’s how.

Photomatix Pro can both open and CREATE Radiance HDR files (this is the 32bit file that is the result of your merge) Nik HDR Efex Pro can only Open them it can’t create them.

Truth of the matter also is that Photomatix Pro is better at merging files especially for deghosting and complex images.

So normally what we would do is; Select the images we want to make an HDR with and just export and do the merge with the program we are going to use and that works fine.

 But like I said I am lazy and also impatient and the last thing I like doing is watching progress bars go across my screen and spinning doohickeys. I wanna work NOW. So why do that twice.

What I do is; I do my merge in Photomatix Pro and have it show the 32Bit file before it goes to tone mapping.

After the merge, at that point I save the file as a Radiance HDR file.

Then I go on to Tone map in Photomatix Pro. But when I want to see the results I would get in Nik HDR Efex Pro I only have to open the Radiance HDR file and go, no waiting for the merge.

And like I have said before. It’s not that one program is better than the other, they are just different. They just plain do things differently and you can’t make either one look like the other.

I just hope that neither one finds out or they will both leave my computer and I would be stuck with HDR in Photoshop, and she’s just plain homely

Hope that helps

PT