HDR Workflow – Part 3

Friday, May 25,  2012 – Good evening and welcome to the end of another great week!!  So this is the third post in understanding how to process images for HDR.  To refresh your memory I am using Photomatix Pro to merge and tone map my images, and Imagenomic’s Noiseware to reduce noise.  I had a set of images that I was going to use to test the method I had come up with in the previous post but I found out that the only useable image was one that I had previously worked on.  I took that image, copied the changes I had made to another raw file, applied those changes, and finally saved the tiff file.  I then started the tone mapping process but what I found out is that noise reduction is applied automatically and cannot be deselected.  The only way to do this is to edit the camera raw file without any changes made in ACR or go through a length process which I will describe.  So first what I had to do was take the tiff, tone map (allowing photomatix to use noise reduction), either save the settings or use previous, close that file, open the original tiff, and finally Batch single photos applying those settings to that one file.  Whew!!  I did some reading on HDRsoft’s site and didn’t see anything at all about processing a single tiff without noise reduction being applied.  I think I will email them and see if there is another way because that just adds so much time if processing a single file.  I didn’t find all of this out till late Wednesday night (almost Thursday morning) and haven’t had a chance to work on that single file.  I hope to have it done by the weekend but if not I will most definitely have it done soon!!  Have a great weekend!!